Code editors and IDEs

The Windows and OSX versions of R both come with built-in code editors, which allow code to be edited, saved, and sent to the R console. It's hard to recommend that you use this because it is rather primitive. Most users would be best served by RStudio (rstudio.com/), which includes project management and version control (including support for Git, which is covered in Chapter 7, Sharing Your Creations), viewing of data and graphics, code completion, package management, and many other features. The following is an illustrative screenshot of an RStudio session:

As can be seen, in the top-left corner, there is the code editing pane (with syntax highlighting). The clockwise move from there will take you to the environment pane (in which the different objects loaded into the session can be seen); the viewing pane containing various options such as Files, Plots, Build, Help, and the console (again, with syntax highlighting). In the middle, there is one of the most useful features of RStudio—the ability to view dataframes. This function also comes with sorting and filtering by column.

However, if you already use an IDE for other types of code, it is quite likely that R can be well integrated into it. Examples of IDEs with good R integration include the following:

• Emacs with the Emacs Speaks Statistics plugin
• Vim with the Vim-R plugin
• Eclipse with the StatET plugin