This follows up on Duncan Murdock's reply to Boris Steipe's question
about possible advantages to using RStudio.
I agree with Mr. Murdock's list of advantages of RStudio, but disagree
mildly with his comment about feeling that the tiled display provides
too little space. When I use RStudio, I usually set its window to
occupy most of the available workspace on my monitor; and I adjust the
sizes of the different quadrants of the tiling to suit what I'm doing at
the moment. Typically, this means that I use a wide rectangle to
display plots and the like, often choose a smaller height for the
Environment area, and so on. It's very easy to re-size the individual
tile areas.
In addition to Mr. Murdock's list of advantages, I can point out that
RStudio provides a substantial number of shortcuts and time-savers. The
following book is a rich source of information about detailed
capabilities of RStudio: "Learning RStudio for R Statistical Computing",
by M.P.J. van der Loo and E. de Jonge, 2012.
Their book has impressed me so much that I have spent a good part of the
past week working methodically, page by page, through the book, an
effort which has contributed much to my personal comfort with using R
and RStudio. I'm still learning to use R, but the tricks and shortcuts
I've learned from this book have been extremely helpful; and I'm a
considerably better user of both R and RStudio, thanks to the book. (And
I've even given a post-Christmas gift copy of the book to a son-in-law
who uses R in his job in the oil business.)
Ronald Wyllys
Emeritus Professor
The University of Texas at Austin
On 01/11/2015 05:00 AM, r-help-requ...@r-project.org wrote:
Message: 14 Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 05:30:55 -0500 From: Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> To: Boris Steipe
<boris.ste...@utoronto.ca>, R mailing list <r-help@r-project.org>
Subject: Re: [R] R vs. RStudio? Message-ID:
<54b250df.8080...@gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=windows-1252 On 10/01/2015 9:22 PM, Boris Steipe wrote:
>Could someone kindly enlighten me whether there are currently advantages to
use R Studio vs. the normal R GUI? On the Mac I can't seem to find anything
compelling, on Windows (which I don't use myself) I noticed last year that there
seems to be no syntax highlighting available for the R GUI but R Studio had it.
>
>Surely there must be some value proposition in that project, what am I missing?
I find several advantages, and one or two disadvantages.
- The debugger is nicer. You can set breakpoints in the code editor
and it installs them in the right place.
- It has lots of support for things like Sweave, knitr, rmarkdown, etc.
- It is easy to switch between different projects.
- It looks the same on all platforms, so if you switch platforms you
still know what you're doing.
Negatives:
- I don't like the tiled display. I find it doesn't give me enough space.
- At least until recently, I haven't checked with the latest release,
it converts files to the native format, i.e. saving a file on Windows
gives you CR LF line endings, doing it elsewhere converts them to LF.
This is really irritating when files get changed for no good reason.
Duncan Murdoch
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