RStudio IDE

2025-09-03

Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

  • Posit provides a free IDE for R with RStudio
  • those with more programming experience may want to experiment with Positron (newer and adapted to LLMs)
  • IDEs provide a framework for developing software, carrying out analyses, and integrating code with analysis
  • they can help with creating packages, documenting functions and using external tools such as gitHub

The panes

The Basics

Let’s try a few things together:

  • Open a new R script file.
  • Learn tab complete.
  • Run commands while editing scripts.
  • Run the entire script.
  • Make a plot.
  • Change options to never save workspace.
  • Change IDE appearance.

Projects

Let’s try this together:

  • Start a new project in a new directory.
  • Start a new project in an existing directory.
  • Change projects.
  • Use the File menu to create a new Quarto document

Type of editor

  • the editor you use will depend on what kind of document you are editing

  • they can be customized in many ways and often have language specific settings

  • we will be creating and editing markdown documents - mostly using the Quarto paradigm

  • for Quarto you can use either a source view or a visual view:

    • Source - See the actual code (WYSIWYG)
    • Visual - Partial preview of final document.

Note: You can state your preference in a the header:

title: RStudio IDE
keywords: "Productivity Tools"

editor: source
  • We learn more about Quarto soon