[R] text editors

[David Reinke]

It depends on your needs, your budget, and your personal tastes. I program in a number of languages, so I want a text editor that I can configure easily. I used CodeWright for years, but it's in limbo now since Borland acquired it and no longer supports it.

I've switched over to SlickEdit. One can configure it different languages in addition to the templates that already come with it (I've built one for R). I bought it also for its other capabilities such as editing large files and binary files. Emacs and Vim are also fine. You might also look up "text editors" in Wikipedia, which gives some general advice; it also has links to comparisons of text editors and a link called 'editor war' (Emacs vs other editors).

A cardinal rule in among developers is never to try to convince someone else that your text editor is better, so take your pick.


David Reinke

Senior Transportation Engineer/Economist
Dowling Associates, Inc.
180 Grand Avenue, Suite 250
Oakland, California 94612-3774
510.839.1742 x104 (voice)
510.839.0871 (fax)
www.dowlinginc.com

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-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Tobias Verbeke
Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 10:22 AM
To: Sharpie
Cc: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R] text editors

Sharpie wrote:
> 
> Dwayne Blind wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> Do you use a text editor ? What would you recommend for Windows users ?
>> What
>> about Tinn-R ?
>>
>> Thank you very much,
>> Dwayne
>>
>>
> 
> Learning a text editor is a significant and very valuable investment of your
> time.  In order to maximize the return from this investment you will want to
> choose an editor that works well with all the languages and operating
> systems you currently use, as well as the ones you may use in the future.
> 
> For example, I spend an equal amount of time working on Windows, OS X and
> Linux.  There are a ton of great Windows-only editors out there, but they
> aren't a good option for me because I only use windows 1/3 of the time I'm
> at a computer.
> 
> Some good editors I know of that fall into this category are Emacs, Vim and
> Eclipse.  For integrating with R, Emacs has the ESS plug-in and Eclipse has
> an extension called StatET.
> 
> Eclipse is a rather large in terms of file size compared to Emacs or Vim--
> also I know Emacs and Vim can be used through a ssh connection.  I'm not
> sure about Eclipse as I haven't used it much.  

For the record: it is perfectly possible to configure an 'R Remote
Console' in StatET which will launch R over an SSH connection. You can
then disconnect from /reconnect to an R session on server etc.

Best,
Tobias

> This is important because if
> you happen to be stuck on a computer that is locked down and doesn't have
> your editor of choice installed there is still a chance that you will be
> able to use ssh to reach a computer that does.
> 
> Personally, I use Vim and have found it just fine for my needs.
> 
> 
> ESS: http://ess.r-project.org/
> StatET:
> http://www.walware.de/?page=/;jsessionid=b4d82261e53bd419d41609155e9e
> 
> -Charlie

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