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Shipped 2026-08-13 · Capture and Bird Until today you could not attach an R script to Bower at all. The upload refused it, and if you got one in another way it sat there as a download link: not readable, not searchable, invisible to Bird. That is fixed, across every surface where code shows up.

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What’s new

  • Code files upload. .R, .Rmd, .Rnw, .py, .ipynb, .sql, .sh, .jl, .m, .do and more. If Bower turned your .R away before, that was not you doing it wrong: most operating systems register no file type for these, so the browser sends the upload with the type field blank. Bower now recognises them by extension.
  • Scripts open as code, not as a download. Syntax highlighted, language named at the top, copy and download on the block. An .Rmd keeps its chunk headers and their options intact.
  • Search reads inside your scripts. Import a script and search for a function you defined in it. Bird can read it too, instead of asking you to paste it into the chat.
  • Note code blocks are syntax aware, with a language picker on each block. The language travels with the note, so a block you tag as R is stored and searched as R.
  • Bird writes code in your language. If your work is R, you get R back, not a Python translation of what you asked for.

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What Bird will not do

Bird can run Python in a sandbox. It cannot run R, and there is no R interpreter anywhere in Bower. Ask it to run an R script and it will tell you so, then offer the two things that exist: write the script out for you to run in RStudio, or do the equivalent analysis in Python and label it clearly as Python. It will not quietly translate your analysis into another language and hand back the number as though it came from your code. A result you cannot tell apart from the real thing is worse than no result.

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Why

Researchers do not stop writing code when they open a lab notebook. The analysis that produced a figure, the query behind a table, the chunk that cleans the plate readings: that work belonged in the record next to the results it produced, and it had nowhere to go.

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Notes

Bower does not guess a code block’s language. A block with no language set renders as plain text, because a wrong guess recolours your code silently and short R snippets are easy to mistake for something else. Files over 256 KB are not rendered in the browser. You get the file details and a download button, because highlighting a file that size locks up the tab. Full detail in Code in Bower.