I finally reached the point where I was using dplyr enough to get annoyed with typing %>%. I’m guessing if I was using Linux and Emacs this would be a trivial problem to solve. But I use RStudio on Windows, so my solution is a little more involved. Here it is in case anyone is interested.

1. Go to http://www.autohotkey.com/, download AutoHotkey, and install. It’s open source.
2. Right click on your desktop and click New > AutoHotkey Script
3. Give it name like “chain”
4. Right click on the script you just created and click Edit Script
5. Leave the existing text in the script as is and enter the following at the bottom, which maps %>% to the keys Ctrl + Shift + . (period)

^+.::
SendRaw `%
SendRaw >
SendRaw `%
return

6. Save and close the file
7. Double-click on the file; it should now be running in your system tray
8. Go to RStudio and hit Ctrl + Shift + . (period) That should enter %>%

To make this happen every time you start your computer, move or copy the “chain.ahk” file to your Startup folder.

To learn more about all the things AutoHotkey can do, check out their documentation.

Credit where credit is due: Here is the Stack Overflow thread where I learned about Autokey, which led me to AutoHotkey. And here is a helpful exchange on the AutoHotkey forum that showed me how to get the script to work.

UPDATE: LOL, turns out there’s a hot-key in R studio for this: Ctrl + Shift + M.