RStudio is my R development environment of choice and I work primarily on/in Mac OS X. While it’s great that Apple provides a built-in Terminal application, I prefer to use [iTerm 2](http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home) when I need to do work at a shell. The fine folks at RStudio provide a handy `Shell`… menu item off the `Tools` menu, but it (rightly) defaults to using Apple’s Terminal.app for functionality since they can’t assume what terminal application you are using.
To change it to iTerm (or whatever your favorite terminal application is) you need to fire up a text editor and change (make a backup first!) `/Applications/RStudio.app/Contents/MacOS/mac-terminal` to contain the following modified AppleScript:
#!/usr/bin/osascript on run argv set dir to quoted form of (first item of argv) tell app "iTerm" activate tell the first terminal launch session "Default Session" tell the last session set name to "RStudio Session" write text "cd " & dir end tell end tell end tell end run
That will open a new tab in iTerm, set the session (tab) name to “RStudio Session” and change the directory to the current working directory in RStudio.
More often than not, I’m just using [Alfred](http://www.alfredapp.com/) to kick up iTerm and doing the `cd` myself, but this added tweak (which you have to do **every** time you upgrade RStudio) reduces the churn when I do end up using the feature within RStudio.
