Rstudio
Posted on
Dorothy Bishop
Joined: 02/04/2010
Forums
On the download page, where you tell people to install R, could you also point them to Rstudio. http://rstudio.org/
It's free.
It makes the R interface more like Matlab and transforms the R experience. For those of us grappling with learning R alongside learning OpenMx, it makes an enormous difference.
Concur: why not a wikipage link to keep it up to date?
Sounds like a helpful idea: Perhaps to make it updatable, we should link to something like "You may also wish to download one of several available R front ends" and point to a wiki page on OpenMx that can list these with user-editable hints and comments.
Like http://openmx.psyc.virginia.edu/wiki/frontends
Personally, I'll put in a plug for current versions of R.app on OS X, esp with Hans Jorg Bibiko and Simon Urbanek working on this so hard recently.
We now have not only great tab-completion (functions of course, but also for variable names via $ and @ tab completion). But also really nice smart parameter insertion for all functions (push cntrl-.)
Very handy!
There is also automatic quote and bracket closing. And if you select a word and type quote or bracket, it is wrapped not overwritten.
History is filterable and grep-searchable.... lots of niceties plus all the basics of listing and viewing data files as spreadsheets, edit, view/manage packages etc.
I like having multiple resizable windows also.
Quite a few new additions too: if you drop a .sav file onto it, it completes the read.spss() function for you, and a very handy capability of cmd-clickable help examples (select anything in a help window, and you can execute it).
Anyhow: Each to their own, so let's link to something to point to all those "own" choices :-)
Log in or register to post comments
In reply to Concur: why not a wikipage link to keep it up to date? by tbates
various front ends
I had no idea there were other options, but I do think it would help beginners if you kept it simple.
I'm thinking of the kind of person who may be migrating from Mx but not be familiar with R .They may not know what a front-end is and won't want to be offered a choice. They just want to get up and running with R.
There's a danger of overwhelming people by attempting to be comprehensive.
So I'd suggest just pointing beginners to whichever front end you think is most user-friendly, and have a link for more experienced people pointing to other options.
Certainly Rstudio does it for me - had no idea it existed until Saturday and have been cheerfully using it since then. I've been asking around our department and very few R users are aware of any options other than the standard R interface, which is pretty offputting if you are used to working with something like Matlab.
Log in or register to post comments
In reply to various front ends by Dorothy Bishop
Rstudio
What I like about Rstudio from a cursory glance is that it has a server edition, so one can use the same interface for working on a nice big cluster as one does for working locally on a PC. It looks like it has good MPI, snowfall and similar tool support for parallel processing.
My current personal preference is to use textmate on the mac, which has a number of really nice features, including multiple computer language (latex processing etc. too) support, command completion, and the ability to group a set of files one is working on in a project for later simultaneous reload. But each to their own and Rstudio has server support so I might switch just for that. Also, syntax highlighting for Windows users is pretty nice since this feature was missing from R itself last time I checked.
Log in or register to post comments
In reply to various front ends by Dorothy Bishop
"options other than the
"options other than the standard R interface, which is pretty offputting if you are used to working with something like Matlab."
If you've been using the standard Matlab interface for Matlab, let me suggest matlab-emacs (http://matlab-emacs.sourceforge.net/). Once you're up and running Matlab through Emacs, Emacs + ESS makes the move to R about as tricky as adapting to a bigger monitor :p
In all seriousness, I like the idea of suggesting several options. True, it may be a bit overwhelming to beginners, but choice and flexibility is the spirit of R. There are some exciting developments coming to Deducer (GUI (+ console) front end to R). Once those come out (end of the year, I think), it may be another good option. It provides a flexible point and click interface to bring data in, but still allows users to use syntax. It could ease the burden of dealing with the data aspect of R for users just interested in OpenMx.
Log in or register to post comments