This follows up on Duncan Murdock's reply to Boris Steipe's question about possible advantages to using RStudio. I agree with Mr. Murdock's list of advantages of RStudio, but disagree mildly with his comment about feeling that the tiled display provides too little space. When I use RStudio, I usually set its window to occupy most of the available workspace on my monitor; and I adjust the sizes of the different quadrants of the tiling to suit what I'm doing at the moment. Typically, this means that I use a wide rectangle to display plots and the like, often choose a smaller height for the Environment area, and so on. It's very easy to re-size the individual tile areas. In addition to Mr. Murdock's list of advantages, I can point out that RStudio provides a substantial number of shortcuts and time-savers. The following book is a rich source of information about detailed capabilities of RStudio: "Learning RStudio for R Statistical Computing", by M.P.J. van der Loo and E. de Jonge, 2012. Their book has impressed me so much that I have spent a good part of the past week working methodically, page by page, through the book, an effort which has contributed much to my personal comfort with using R and RStudio. I'm still learning to use R, but the tricks and shortcuts I've learned from this book have been extremely helpful; and I'm a considerably better user of both R and RStudio, thanks to the book. (And I've even given a post-Christmas gift copy of the book to a son-in-law who uses R in his job in the oil business.) Ronald Wyllys Emeritus Professor The University of Texas at Austin On 01/11/2015 05:00 AM, r-help-request at r-project.org wrote:> Message: 14 Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 05:30:55 -0500 From: Duncan Murdoch > <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> To: Boris Steipe > <boris.steipe at utoronto.ca>, R mailing list <r-help at r-project.org> > Subject: Re: [R] R vs. RStudio? Message-ID: > <54B250DF.8080203 at gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; > charset=windows-1252 On 10/01/2015 9:22 PM, Boris Steipe 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? > I find several advantages, and one or two disadvantages. > > - The debugger is nicer. You can set breakpoints in the code editor > and it installs them in the right place. > > - It has lots of support for things like Sweave, knitr, rmarkdown, etc. > > - It is easy to switch between different projects. > > - It looks the same on all platforms, so if you switch platforms you > still know what you're doing. > > Negatives: > > - I don't like the tiled display. I find it doesn't give me enough space. > > - At least until recently, I haven't checked with the latest release, > it converts files to the native format, i.e. saving a file on Windows > gives you CR LF line endings, doing it elsewhere converts them to LF. > This is really irritating when files get changed for no good reason. > > Duncan Murdoch