Snippets

R studio has a very helpful tool called snippets. ⊕ So… this was supposed to be a very quick post about a nice thing I found to speed up my workflow. But I wanted to write in the post the literal shortcodes used. This meant that they were interpreted and turned into a marginnote rather than displayed.
What I needed to do was escape the shortcodes, but nothing I tried seemed to work. After a lot more googling than I’m really happy admitting I posted a stack exchange question and someone got me the answer. But it was surprisingly hard to discover for what I had assumed would be a straightforward thing.
It is apparently an undocumented feature. Snippets let you designate an alias for small bits of code that you use often. You can assign a shortcut to a piece of code and call it up when you need it. These also work in markdown documents, like this one.

For example, The shortcode to add a marginnote is:

{{% marginnote /%}} … {{%/ /marginnote %}}

It’s not particularly complicated, but it’s annoying. So I added a snippet. Now I type “margin” and press SHIFT + TAB and it automatically fills in what I need.