RStudio

I’m not normally a big user of IDEs, but I have to say that the new RStudio is pretty slick. It’s a free, open-source IDE for R and looks a bit like the Matlab IDE with a tabbed interface for convenient access to variables and objects, plots and data tables. RStudio runs on Mac, Linux and Windows or on a server, where it can be accessed remotely through a web browser. A nice touch is that it supports Sweave and TeX document creation, although I haven’t tested either of those yet. Maybe now’s the time to learn some Sweave. I started to use RStudio yesterday and I think it will replace the Mac GUI for R that I have been using. The latter is all right but a bit too disjointed when you start plotting and editing several files at once.