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Possible Duplicate:
What IDEs are available for R in Linux?
Recommendations for Windows text editor for R

Which IDE or TextEditor do you use to write R code?

Community
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Christian
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  • I'm all for the plan for publishing those R questions here but this one seems S&A to me. 1/ How is the choice of text editor a programming question? 2/ It has no definitive answer. Perhaps if you'd asked for the pros and cons, that might have been better. – paxdiablo Sep 17 '09 at 14:03
  • The question posed in the duplicates was phrased in a leading way which gave different answers. I decided to try StatET due to this question and winning answer :-) – tovare Sep 21 '11 at 21:20

8 Answers8

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I've been using Eclipse/StatET. However, there's a new FLOSS IDE that was released today that looks interesting called RStudio. It even supports Sweave, so once it becomes more polished I may switch. User input seemed a little sluggish when I played with it earlier today however.

RStudio Screenshot

Update

They have been actively updating RStudio every month or two. It's been months since I encountered even a minor bug. And the features added are really useful--seamless package development and native Git support being the two that come to mind.

Ari B. Friedman
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  • man, you have been pretty quick to find the right place to post it. Obviously haven't seen much of it by now, but looks pretty good on first sight. – Matt Bannert Mar 01 '11 at 10:10
  • @ran: I'm a bit frustrated with Eclipse right now, since it poses new and unique challenges to set up every time I install it on a different machine! So the promise of a potentially easy-to-setup, integrated IDE made me very excited. We'll see how it plays out as the code develops further. – Ari B. Friedman Mar 01 '11 at 14:49
  • Used RStudio for a while and prefer it over Tinn-R but it still lacks some basic coding functions like function folding and overview of your current functions. Aut-complete also only works once you have that object created, in other words not at all inside functions. I recommend RStudio if your not writing your own functions but are just running plain statistics – Max Gordon Aug 17 '11 at 08:36
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    @MaxG I agree it needs some work before its as complete as Eclipse/StatET or Emacs/ESS. They gave a talk at useR this week in which they indicated they're working on it for the long term, so hopefully things will only become more complete. I for one am looking forward to Git support. – Ari B. Friedman Aug 17 '11 at 09:30
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    Just a note that they've fixed a lot of bugs and added SVN/Git support. Still not as feature-filled as Eclipse/StatET or ESS, but with fewer hassles as well. – Ari B. Friedman Feb 10 '12 at 21:14
  • RStudio is so much easier to use but lack of wide code repository support (GIT, BitBucket, etc...) makes it less appealing for development. – codeBarer May 06 '14 at 03:05
  • @codeBarer RStudio works pretty seamlessly with Git and Github.... – Ari B. Friedman May 06 '14 at 10:41
  • @AriB.Friedman we use to use Git but we moved to Stash and for some projects we use BitBucket and I couldn't get the repo to clone in a R project. – codeBarer May 06 '14 at 14:18
  • It seems pretty website-agnostic to me. They're pretty good about support requests even on the free version. Go give them a detailed description of the problem and I suspect they'll fix it. – Ari B. Friedman May 06 '14 at 19:33
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This is ultimately a very subjective question, and will depend on your OS, etc.

I prefer Eclipse (StatET) because I use it for all my development and it has many rich features (e.g. SVN integration, Sweave/Latex integration, project management). If you use Emacs, then ESS is great. This clearly depends on what you like.

I used Tinn-R before, but ultimately I prefer to have one IDE for everything, and Eclipse has a much wider general adoption.

Shane
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I use Eclipse with the StatET plugin.

Pros:

  • Supports everything you'd expect (syntax highlighting, code folding, etc..) but also has s ome nice R interaction pieces.

  • You get all the bells and whistles of Eclipse. For example, we use SVN with our R code and the Subclipse plugin is awesome.

Cons:

  • Eclipse is a beast.
Mark
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My preferred tool on all platforms is the ESS mode for Emacs.

Dirk Eddelbuettel
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  • Dirk... any chance you can post your .emacs file (or the ESS-relevant part)? – Vince Oct 07 '09 at 06:18
  • Sure, but there isn't much to it. The R Internals manuals has section Coding Standards with a few lines the R Core team recommends for default indentation etc and I use just that, plus ESS defaults. – Dirk Eddelbuettel Oct 07 '09 at 11:50
  • 'Sooner or later, you have to face facts. Man up and learn Emacs.' today on slashdot ;-) – mrsteve Mar 28 '11 at 22:07
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I've been using TINN-R for several years and have been very happy with it. It allows you to highlight portions of your code and click to send it to the interpreter, or send one line at a time or the entire file.

kpierce8
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I actually use Textmate and enjoy it quite a bit. But I wouldn't recommend adopting Textmate for R, however if you already use Textmate it's fantastic.

Dan
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I use Jedit along with Romain Francios's edit mode for R (http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr/index.php?post/2009/03/16/A-better-jedit-edit-mode-for-R).

Rahul Premraj
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  • I like jEdit a lot for both R and Stata use. If it had a Sweave mode I would use it much more. I'm finding myself migrating more and more to Eclipse for its full IDE capabilities. – Ari B. Friedman Mar 01 '11 at 04:04
  • I appreciate Eclipse for it's functionality, but it's an elephant that eats up a lot of memory and slows down my machine. – Rahul Premraj Jun 09 '11 at 20:27
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I'm not really familiar with the R-Project but I use PSPad.

It allows you to organize your (text-)files in a project style fashion.

Thizzer
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