[R] R vs. RStudio?

[Duncan Murdoch]

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