R text editors for introductory statistics courses

Question

Possible Duplicates:
Best IDE / TextEditor for R
Recommendations for Windows text editor for R

Dear All,

I teach a large introductory R course (about 100 students), and would like to recommend suitable text editors for R. The students who attend this course are first year mathematics undergraduates doing their very first course in R. They have never programmed in any language before.

For the vast majority of them, it wouldn't beneficial for them to learn to use a 'complex editor' - by this I mean emacs and vi.

What I would like to do is recommend simple text editors that are

• free
• can be easily installed on their laptops by users with little computer knowledge
• have R syntax highlighting.
• available for Windows or Mac.

For windows I've found:

• TINN-R
• Notepad ++ with the R plugin

Are there any others that I've missed for Windows?

There are a few threads that deal with R text editors:

• Best IDE / TextEditor for R
• Recommendations for Windows text editor for R
• Which IDE for R in Linux?

but these are a bit too complicated for my purpose.

Edits

Following comments from Shane and others I've reworded the question.

Answer 1

I haven't used it myself, but there is an Eclipse plug-in for R (which should work on Windows and Mac).

Answer 2

As always, emacs is an option: R in Emacs

This may not be the best option because of the learning curve with emacs though.

Answer 3

Because someone already mentioned Emacs, of course there's VIM with R plugin, don't know how many of those there are, but I found at least one with a quick google. VIM might have an even steeper learning curve than Emacs though.

That said. I think Emacs and VIM will both handle pretty much any language out there, so let the flame war begin!

Answer 4

I haven't used it for R but TextMate on the Mac is awesome and they have an R bundle.

Answer 5

Given that you don't have an major specific requirements (like an object browser), it's probably best to use what you're already using as much as possible. Something like Textpad is very simple and can do syntax highlighting.

Here are a few more pointers:

• First of all, the R console that ships with Windows has it's own script editor. Just go File > New Script. It's very easy to use and you can execute code by highlighting it. If you just want something simple, I would stick with that.
• I use Eclipse (with StatET) on Windows, and I have used it on a Mac too. It's great if you want an extensive IDE (syntax highlighting, integrated console, SVN, etc.) with a small learning curve.
• JGR is also very good and platform independent.
• Sciviews (which has Tinn-R) has several other options, including SciViews-K which is an R extension for Komodo.
• Two others worth mentioning are Rattle and Rkward.
• Emacs and VIM have a bigger learning curve, but they're also very powerful, especially if you're already using them for something else.

Answer 6

I see, this question is distinguished from prior ones by asking for a recommendation specific to "Intro to R" students. For the Mac portion of your question, i would suggest TextMate, for two reasons. First, the default answer "just use the Aqua R.app Gui" that R ships with, has minimal syntax highlighting and doesn't allow you to save and insert R commands (not that i'm aware of at least). Both of those things make learning a new language less painful and more efficient. But that might not justify the overhead of learning an editor while learning a new language at the same time.

No doubt others here will recommend TM, but they might not mention TextMate's tiered learning curve, i.e., someone who has never seen TM before can, after a 45-min tutorial, launch an interactive R session from it and use it to save/retrieve R commands "snippets". TM is not free, but it's around $50 with academic discount i believe. I would recommend three bundles for R use in TM, (i) R.app; (ii) R.daemon; and (iii) R, all of which are in the TM svn repository.

Answer 7

I use Vim myself but I'm quite certain that both Vim and Emacs would be a bad choice for a student course.