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A blog by Rob J Hyndman 

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RStudio: just what I’ve been looking for

Published on 1 March 2011

For many years I used RWinEdt as my text edi­tor for R code, but when WinEdt 6.0 came out, RWinEdt stopped work­ing. So I’ve been look­ing for some­thing to replace it. I’ve tried Tinn-​​R, Npp­ToR, Eclipse with StatET and a cou­ple of other edi­tors, but noth­ing was quite right.

Then yes­ter­day, out of the blue, RStu­dio was announced and it looks fan­tas­tic! A screen­shot is given below.

The win­dow con­tains a smart edi­tor with code com­ple­tion and tab­bing, con­sole, work­space with view­able objects, plot­ting panel with his­tory, etc. And it runs on all major plat­forms (or over the web if you have a linux server handy).

It is free­ware. Down­load and instal­la­tion was a breeze. I think this is my new work­ing envi­ron­ment for R!

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13 Comments  comments 
  • http://jeromyanglim.blogspot.com Jeromy Anglim

    This could be great for teach­ing as well.

    I’m busy learn­ing Vim and the Vim-​​R plu­gin at the moment, but it would be great to hear how you find RStudio.

  • Alessio

    I believe it is just amaz­ing. The only thing I find odd is that there is no way to nav­i­gate the plots besides the nor­mal back/​forward.

    This could be a huge help in com­pa­nies. The fact that you can click on a data.frame vari­able and have an excel-​​like grid (I always used a UNIX ter­mi­nal for R, not the best for new­bies) is some­thing very help­ful for peo­ple new to R.

  • Wok

    I have launched it and played a bit. Although I am not sure about the encod­ing (UTF-​​8?). Just wow!

  • scotto

    This looks nice but it’s still miss­ing the main thing I’m look­ing for in an R envi­ron­ment: an inter­ac­tive way to zoom and pan plots that’s as good as, say, Matlab’s.

  • Kon­rad

    I agree with the above, but don’t you guys find it a bit slow on exe­cu­tion? On my machine (where “vanilla” R is run­ning just fine), com­mand exe­cu­tion and sav­ing the script changes seem to take really long…

    • Kon­rad

      On a sec­ond attempt, after a reboot every­thing is fine speed-​​wise and if there’s one thing I’m miss­ing, it’s code fold­ing a’la Notepad ++

  • http://myweb.dal.ca/rb504718/index.html Robert

    This looks great! I’ve only been using R for about a year, and had set­tled on Npp­ToR as my pri­mary solu­tion, but hav­ing Npp, R win­dow, and HTML help all open sep­a­rate always felt like it was slow­ing me down. Hav­ing every­thing (includ­ing a file browser and help) all in one place is nice!

  • Wade Wall

    I mostly agree, but find it slow on open­ing. Also, I can’t find out how to open the IDE with­out start­ing R. With TINN-​​R, I can open it up, open up a script, and then start R with the work­ing direc­tory being where the script file is located. I like this option.

  • jjunju

    I have also used RWinEdt and got frus­trated at version6. Then I set­tled with Npp­ToR esp for quick test-​​coding but found eclipse with statET to be a use­ful though some­times tedious alter­na­tive to man­age Projects. I think that I will replace Npp­ToR with Rstu­dio, I will still use eclipse-​​statET for some projects because of things like code fold­ing, but hope that these and oth­ers can be inte­grated in Rstu­dio for its simplicity.

  • phnk

    I am very sat­is­fied with RStu­dio too. It really helps under­stand­ing how the R envi­ron­ment works. It is already excel­lent and head­ing towards get­ting even better!

    The next thing I would like to see hap­pen­ing in the R world is a bet­ter organ­ised hier­ar­chy of help resources. I still find learn­ing about Stata much easier.

  • Sub­ra­man­ian

    Hello

    i installed R-​​studio but on start­ing the pro­gram i only see the fol­low­ing mes­sage:
    —————-
    ERROR

    Cache Access Denied.

    The fol­low­ing error was encoun­tered while try­ing to retrieve the URL: http://127.0.0.1:19736/

    Cache Access Denied.

    Sorry, you are not cur­rently allowed to request http://127.0.0.1:19736/ from this cache until you have authen­ti­cated yourself.

    Please con­tact the cache admin­is­tra­tor if you have dif­fi­cul­ties authen­ti­cat­ing your­self or change your default password.

    Gen­er­ated Sun, 20 Mar 2011 14:32:35 GMT by vmsquid1 (squid/3.1.1)

    ——————————

    What do i do? Is it because my inter­net con­nec­tion is through a proxy?

    • http://robjhyndman.com Rob J Hyndman

      No idea. I can­not pro­vide a help ser­vice on all things related to R.

  • http://www.monash.edu.au Han Lin Shang

    I have installed Rstu­dio, and run it on Mac OS and Win­dows. It worked great, highly rec­om­mend it to other R users. It looks like a combo of MATLAB inter­face and R soft­ware. Thanks for sug­gest­ing it.