Last Updated on July 17, 2023
RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R. RStudio combines an intuitive user interface with powerful coding tools to help you get the most out of R. It
includes a console, syntax-highlighting editor that supports direct code execution, as well as tools for plotting, history, and workspace management.
RStudio includes a wide range of productivity enhancing features and runs on all major platforms. RStudio can optionally also be run as server which enables you to provide a browser based interface to a version of R running on a remote system.
Read our interactive tutorial for data science using R and RStudio. No programming knowledge required.
Features include:
- Customizable workbench with all of the tools required to work with R in one place (console, source, plots, workspace, help, history, etc).
- Syntax highlighting editor with code completion.
- Execute code directly from the source editor (line, selection, or file).
- Full support for authoring Sweave and TeX documents.
- Searchable history.
- Retrieve previous commands.
- Keyboard shortcuts.
- Easy installation of new packages
- Runs on all major platforms and can also be run as a server, enabling multiple users to access the RStudio IDE using a web browser
- Integrated help functionality.
- RStudio works with the manipulate package to add interactive capabilities to standard R plots.
R Notebook features:
- R Markdown document with chunks that can be executed independently and interactively, with output visible immediately beneath the input. R Notebooks are a method of literate programming that allows for direct interaction with R while producing a reproducible document with publication-quality output.
- Inline output (notebook mode) on all R Markdown documents.
- Plain-text files and therefore work well with version control.
- Keyboard shortcuts.
- rmarkdown package provides several functions that can be used to read and write R Notebooks outside of RStudio.
Website: posit.co
Support: Documentation
Developer: RStudio, Inc.
License: GNU Affero GPL v3
RStudio is written in Java, C++ and JavaScript. Learn Java with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn JavaScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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RStudio is extremely heavy a piece of software. It just takes over your computer just to crash at the end and, for you to restart it, you’ll wait a whole bunch of time!
RStudio is first-class software. We’ve never had a single crash with the software.
RStudio does consume RAM, but it’s superb software, rock solid. Maybe there’s something wrong with your computer, Pedro? Compiling all the R packages on a Linux box does take a long time; Windows actually is better in that respect as no compiling is needed.
I’ve had issues with crashing as well, typically if I start something else that’s resource intensive while running Rstudio (or maybe the other way around, but it was Rstudio that crashed.) I still use Rstudio extensively. My biggest issue is that it doesn’t use screen space efficiently.
I use RStudio every day. The user interface definitely isn’t perfect but it’s still fantastic software.
I never like having to compile all the libraries I use as I sometimes distro hop.