Yeah, the registry thing is annoying. One thing you can do from R is something like
Sys.setenv(PATH = paste0("C:\\Rtools,", "C:\\Rtools\bin,",
"C:\\Rtools\\mingw_64\\bin,",
Sys.getenv("PATH"))
or whatever is the correct path to where you have Rtools installed. You can even put that line into a .Rprofile
file in your home directory so that it gets executed automatically at startup without you having to type it out each time.