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R text editors for initial statistics courses

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

Dear,

I teach a large introductory course R (about 100 students) and would like to recommend suitable text editors for R. Students who attend this course are first-year mathematics students who make their first course in R. They never programmed in any language earlier.

For the vast majority of them, it would be useful for them to learn how to use the "complex editor" - by this I mean emacs and vi.

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

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

For windows I found:

Are there any others that I missed for Windows?

There are several threads that deal with R text editors:

but it is too difficult for my purpose.

edits

Following the comments of Shane and others, I reformulated the question.

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7 answers

Given that you do not have any special requirements (such as an object browser), it is best to use what you already use as much as possible. Something like Text Panel is very simple and can highlight syntax.

Here are some more pointers:

  • First of all, the R console shipped with Windows has its own script editor. Just choose File> Create Script. It is very easy to use, and you can execute the code by highlighting it. If you just want something simple, I would stick with that.
  • I use Eclipse (with StatET) on Windows, and I used it also on Mac. This is great if you need an extensive IDE (syntax highlighting, built-in console, SVN, etc.) with a little 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 other noteworthy ones are Rattle and Rkward .
  • Emacs and VIM have a large learning curve, but they are also very powerful, especially if you are already using them for something else.
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I see this question is different from the previous ones, asking for a recommendation specific to Intro to R students. For part of your Mac question, I suggest TextMate for two reasons. Firstly, the default answer “just use the Aqua R.app Gui” that comes with R has minimal syntax highlighting and does not allow you to save and paste R commands (and not what I know, at least). Both of these things make learning a new language less painful and more effective. But this may not justify the overhead of training the editor while learning a new language.

No doubt others here recommend TM, but they may not mention the multi-level TextMate learning curve, i.e. someone who has never seen a TM before, after a 45-minute training course, starts an interactive R session from it and uses it to save / retrieve R commands "fragments". TM is not free, but it is about $ 50 with an academic discount. I would recommend three packages for using R in TM, (i) R.app; (ii) R.daemon; and (iii) R, all of which are in the TM svn repository .

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As always, emacs is an option: R in Emacs

This might not be the best option due to the learning curve with emacs.

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I have not used it for R, but TextMate on Mac is awesome and they have an R package.

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

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Since someone already mentioned Emacs, of course, VIM with the R plugin , I don’t know how many of them there are, but I found at least one with fast Google. VIM can have an even steeper learning curve than Emacs.

That said. I think Emacs and VIM will handle almost any language, so let the fiery war begin!

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I use Vim myself, but I am pretty sure that both Vim and Emacs will be a bad choice for a student course.

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