RStudio – An IDE for the Masses!

I’ll admit it. There’s one thing that always makes me sad working on a mac. R. How does R make me sad on a mac? I look over at my compatriots in Windows using fun Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like Tinn-R, and I sigh. On the other hand, I just had the sad little text editor and shell. Sure, it was enough, and I had wrung some sweet sweet code from that simple setup, but windows would get lost, I’d lose track of what file was where, what plot window was open, and would sometimes even forget which instance of R I was working in when I was working on two projects at the same time (one for simulation, one for analysis).

I mean, sure, I could go through the rigamarole of doing everything through some flavor of Emacs like a 31337 h4X0r. But my Emacs days are behind me. I would have preferred a simpler solution.

So when I saw news of a new, cross-platform, free, lovely IDE called RStudio hit R-bloggers and the Twitterverse, I rejoiced.

But would it be just a kludgy piece of bunk, or a nice, smooth, user experience? I figured I’d give it a whirl. I hopped on over to the website, and had a pleasant easy download experience. Then I fired it up, and ran an old analysis. After fiddling around a little just to get my feet on the ground (which took only a minute or two – the whole thing was quite intuitive), I was pretty pleased. The interface was clean, simple, and purty.

Oh! Quite the little interface, there! Click to get a larger view.

And some features – such as image exporting – were like a dream. So easy, in fact, that I decided to confront it with the problem of exporting an image for publication at the proper image quality (something which is always a bit of a hassle in R normally). But to my delight, no problem. Just fiddled with the size a little bit, and presto! High quality pub-ready image.

So, overall, I’m impressed. And with a Twitter feed, blog, and interactive support forum, I think it looks like this IDE is going to be a great tool for science. So go check it out!