R shiny or Rmarkdown user comments like in Word or Google Docs

Question

I want to create a product/project documentation in R that is going to be reviewed and discussed by a group of reviews. There are plenty of examples of how to create book-like documents using Rmarkdown (e.g. https://bookdown.org/) or interactive data visualizations using R-shiny. However, I could not find any solution for user comments similar to LibreOffice Writer, MS Word, or Google Docs. I could also imagine having a split-pane where one side is dedicated to the content presentation (e.g. text, graphs, code), while the other side is left for comments.

I am aware that such a solution requires a server-side solution for storing comments.

Any hints on existing solutions, workarounds, and implementations are welcome.

Answer 1

If I correctly understood, your question isn't very R specific. R is just code, R files are just text and they don't allow comments (beside the raw hashtag comments) and reviews. Your question is more about version control environments, that allow reviews on code stuff. The most used version control system is git, and git has an integrated panel in RStudio.

Git allows you to split your developpements in branches, which are the different ideas you and your coworkers can work on independentely. Once an idea is finalised, after some consecutive modifications known as commits, it is to be asked for merge in the "main branch". It is a "pull request".

That is where the different platform using git, like GitHub or GitLab, allow some review systems. Basically, when a branch is done, you ask "is that ok ?". Your reviewer can see the changes, can try you things, and tell if that is actually ok. The other advantage of these is the continuous integration, that is : elaborating tests (in R with testthat) that will be tested on some events merge, like "on each merge to master". It is meant to ensure that the software is going forward : if a merge breaks some earlier test, you'll know it.

For beginners, in order to avoid being lost in bash commands, GitHub Desktop is a fine GUI above Git.

Note : You can also rely on the package usethis which has a few helper functions like use_git, use_gitlab_ci, use_github_action... It's not specific to reviews and comments but to the gitlab and github integration