[R] best text editor for Linux?

Stefan Grosse singularitaet at gmx.net
Sat Feb 2 13:10:56 CET 2008


On Saturday 02 February 2008 04:06:38 am Wade Wall wrote:
WW> I know this question has been asked in the past, but I am wondering if
WW> anyone running R on Linux has any guidance as to a text editor that works
WW> well with R.  

Beside the aforementioned emacs+ESS there exists another good editor. You 
could use rkward which I would recommend over emacs if you are new to Linux:

http://rkward.sourceforge.net/

Fedora and Ubuntu both have rkward packaged in their repositories.

rkward look and feel is much closer to tinn-r (+ windows) world. 

rkward has (in my opinion):
- a better highlightning, 
- multiple tabs, 
- it has auto-completition (of functions and objects), 
- copy paste works also with ctrl+c/ctrl+v (in emacs its different), 
- some common functions are offered via the menu's (for the non-purists), 
- html help is supported.
- it allows editing data in a spreadsheet like environment
- you can browse R objects

(to avoid flaming: I know most of this is possible with emacs but maybe we 
agree that it is for a beginner not that easy to learn/configure)

I was quite impressed of the advances rkward made during the last time so I 
switched 2 weeks ago from emacs to rkward...

Cheers
Stefan



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