Wednesday, April 11, 2012

RStudio

I was first introduced to RStudio when I took STA141 with Duncan Temple Lang.  At the time, I was using a PC, and it made things much simpler.  A few of the features that I love about it:

1) Color scheme for scripts.  I can see at a glance what's a comment, and the parentheses pop out at you.  This was something I envied about Macs when I used to use my PC exclusively.  I do wish you could personalize it a little more, but the schemes they have are great.  I personally like Cobalt.

2) Balancing parentheses and quotations.  Yes, this can get obnoxious if you are tweaking existing code rather than starting from scratch, since if you try to type an end quote, it will be interpreted as another beginning quote.  But I find being able to see what's matching your current end parenthesis incredibly helpful.  Besides, if you don't like it, you can easily turn it off in the preferences.

3) Everything in one window.  This wasn't a step up from my PC version since the normal R console keeps everything in one window, but it's so nice to have everything (script, console, history, help pages, graphics) in one window.

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