As most followers of R-bloggers.com and the Twitter #rstats know by now, RStudio is a new open-source IDE for R that was beta-released yesterday. I have started putting it through its paces within my R workflow, and my impressions are more than favorable. I also tried it out on my home Linux server in server mode.
RStudio is obviously designed by people who actually use R and code in R for their data analyses. The basic components of the IDE are clean, switching panes is a breeze, and some features are really useful.
My current highlights are:
Easy installation on Mac and Linux, as well as on a Ubuntu server.
A “packages” pane by which you can checkbox the packages you want loaded
Easy installation of new packages (with auto-completion of package names)
An integrated help functionality using the web docs that keeps things in one window and compact
A quick, light feel to the IDE. I was specially impressed with how well the server version works, and how similar it remains to the desktop version.
Easy exporting of plots to PNG and PDF.
True to the spirit of community and quick responses in the R ecosystem, I have received very quick responses from RStudio on queries and feedback.
A wishlist would include:
Some more keyboard shortcuts, or a way to create customizable shortcuts. Given the source is on github, I’m sure someone will figure this one out. Specifically, a shortcut for Sweave compilation
A shortcut for “<-“. Gotten too used to that in both ESS and TextMate
Some debugging functionality. Once again I’m sure this is on the list
This is a well conceived beta release, and with a few tweaks and suggestions from the R users, I think the final 1.0 release will be very successful. I now know what to suggest as a R IDE to my friends without any hesitation.