R user interfaces

R’s default user interface

Command prompt

For interactive data analysis: type in commands, hit Return key and get text output as a result.

1+7

[1] 8

Comments start with #, they are not executed as a command

9 * 3     # this is a comment

[1] 27

Copy and paste to and from the clipboard as usual (Windows: Ctrl+c and Ctrl+v)
Interrupt R with ESC (on Windows) or Ctrl+c (Linux)
Quit with q()
Save a protocol of your commands and the output with sink("fileName.txt", split=TRUE)

For batch mode:

Rscript.exe input.r

Rterm.exe --no-restore --no-save < input.r > output.txt

On startup, several configuration files are read, see

help(Startup)

Get value for global option

getOption("width")

[1] 80

Change option, save previous value, and restore previous value

op <- options(width=70)
options(op)

Compared to the standard user interface that is already included with R, there are several better alternative options.

RStudio integrated development environment (IDE): Cross platform (Windows, MacOS, Linux), great support for the workflow for these posts, my preferred choice
Eclipse IDE with StatET plugin: Cross platform (Windows, MacOS, Linux), powerful, visual debugging support
Bio7 another customization of the Eclipse IDE for working with R
VS Code can be set up to work with R, as explained in a blog post
Emacs / XEmacs text editor with Emacs Speaks Statistics add-on: Cross platform (Windows, MacOS, Linux), very powerful, hard to learn
JupyterLab is a Jupyter Notebook based IDE which can be installed using the Anaconda distribution (cross platform). In addition, one has to install IRkernel