IDE alternatives for R programming (RStudio, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, Visual Studio)

Question

I use RStudio for R programming. I remember about solid IDE-s from other technology stacks, like Visual Studio or Eclipse.

I have two questions:

1. What other IDE-s than RStudio are used (please consider providing some brief description on them).
2. Does any of them have noticeable advantages over RStudio?

I mostly mean debug/build/deploy features, besides coding itself (so text editors are probably not a solution).

Answer 1

RIDE - R-Brain IDE (RIDE) for R & Python, Other Data Science R IDEs, Other Data Science Python IDEs. Flexible layout. Multiple language support.
https://r-brain.io/
Jupyter notebook - The Jupyter Notebook App is a server-client application that allows editing and running notebook documents via a web browser. The Jupyter Notebook App can be executed on a local desktop
http://jupyter.org/
Jupyter lab -
An extensible environment for interactive and reproducible computing, based on the Jupyter Notebook and Architecture.
https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab
Radiant –
open-source platform-independent browser-based interface for business analytics in R, based on the Shiny package and can be run locally or on a server.
R Tools for Visual Studio (RTVS) - a free, open-source extension for Visual Studio 2017, RTVS is presently supported only in Visual Studio on Windows and not Visual Studio for Mac.
https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/features/rtvs/
Architect - Architect is an integrated development environment (IDE) that focuses specifically on the needs of the data scientist. All data science tasks from analyzing data to writing reports can be performed in a single environment with a common logic.
https://www.getarchitect.io/
displayr - Simple and powerful. Automation by menu or code. Elegant visualizations. Instant publishing. Collaboration. Reproducibility. Auto-updating. Secure cloud platform. https://www.displayr.com/features/
Rbox - This package is a collection of several packages to run R via Atom editor.
https://atom.io/packages/rbox

Use below for more IDEs:
RKWard - an easy to use and easily extensible IDE/GUI for R
Tinn-R - Tinn-R Editor - GUI for R Language and Environment

R AnalyticFlow - data analysis software that utilizes the R environment for statistical computing.
Rgedit - a text-editor plugin.

Nvim-R - Vim plugin for editing R code.
Rattle - A Graphical User Interface for Data Mining using R.

How to Turn Vim Into an IDE for R

Answer 2

IntelliJ supports R via this plugin:

• https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/6632

It's a recent project, so RStudio is still more powerful, including its focus on data-friendly environment (plots and data are always in sight).

Answer 3

You may try using R with Jupyter notebook. It requires installation of jupyter R kernel, IRkernel which will allow you to open a new jupyter notebook with option to choose R instead of default python kernel.

See https://www.continuum.io/blog/developer/jupyter-and-conda-r and https://irkernel.github.io/installation/ for installation steps.

Answer 4

VisualStudio added syntax highlighting for R a few days ago: https://www.visualstudio.com/news/2015-mar-10-vso

The current RStudio preview is pretty cool as well - you can switch to a dark theme, code completion is working well, you can filter in the viewer, etc.

Answer 5

Here's R Language Support for IntelliJ IDEA. However, keep in mind that this support is not in the form of built-in functionality or official plug-in, but rather a third-party plug-in. I haven't tried it, so my opinion on it is limited to the point above.

In my opinion, a better option would be Eclipse, which offers R support via StatET IDE: http://www.walware.de/goto/statet. However, I find Eclipse IDE too heavyweight. Therefore, my preferred option is RStudio IDE - I don't know why one would prefer other options. I especially like RStudio's ability of online access to the full development environment via RStudio Server.

Answer 6

What about ESS, the R (and other stats languages) package for the Emacs editor? It's not formally an IDE, though it has many, if not more of the features of RStudio, just in a different UI (code completion, inline help, object-aware autocomplete, debugging etc.).

Answer 7

The vim-r-plugin is surprisingly good. You can send lines and paragraphs of code from vim into a tmux session running R in a similar manner to R-Studio. It has these commands if you want to check out what functionality it adds to vim. Of course I use all my other normal vim plugins - auto-complete, folding, etc.

Answer 8

You can try R-Brain platform (r-brain.io). R-Brain provides an integrated cloud/on-premises data science platform for developing models with popular open source languages. Powered by Jupyter, our IDE, console, notebook and markdown are all integrated into one environment with full language support for R and Python. R-Brain editor is built with Monaco, the heart of VS code. With Docker technology and prebuilt images, R-Brain empowers data scientists with quick setup, instant collaboration and version control at workspace level.

I am founder of R-Brain.

Shadi

Answer 9

I made a list of all GUIs that produce R code through point-click dialogues. Most of these are not full IDEs and only complement. Rkward is a FOSS multiplatform competitor to Rstudio. R AnalyticFlow specializes in 2d graphical layout of icons of code. At end of link is code to install and run 6 IDE helpers.