On Sat, 10 Jan 2015 21:22:56 -0500 Boris Steipe <boris.ste...@utoronto.ca> 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? > > Thanks, > Boris There are pros and cons as with all things. RStudio in so far R itself is concerned is effectively simply a graphic interface for the terminal. You operate R from within RStudio essentially the same as you would from a terminal. Useful traits include a streamlined means of installing new packages without trolling through CRAN, quick displays of data sets and other objects currently in the work environment, and a very handy way to build scripts for an analysis. Commands can be run from the Console window and copied to an *.R script which can then be fine tuned to produce analytical, tabular and graphical output to files that is readily incorporated into a comprehensive analysis and report. Graphics - plots - are created and buffered in sequence and can be saved from the plot window as image files or pdfs without adding device() lines to the script. A nice addition would be an output window similar to the plot window. As it is, I still use sink() to capture output of tables and analytical results. RStudio does have some highlighting. The biggest gotcha is that R is not precisely the same experience under different environments (e.g. linux vs. windows). RStudio is more consistent across platforms. RStudio is not an environment like RKward or JGR where analytical tools are available through a menu. jwdougherty ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.