Now that I have looked more closely at it I can see that some things are not as bad as I had feared. This clearly has had a lot of work and thought put into it, but it seems to me if people really like using this kind of IDE for R, they must be using R itself in a rather limited and ineffective way. I find this disappointing, a sensation a bit like talking on the phone to a machine. Finally, the documentation was completely unsigned and anonymous. These are not just pretty features – the contribute enormously to the effectiveness of R programming. As far as I could see there was not automatic indetaton facility, no parenthesis matching and the syntax dependent coloring was minimal and apparently fixed. The editor, as some other commentator here eloquently pointed out, sucks. In choosing the CRAN mirror I was limited to the official ones and could not set the local one apart from manually using options(). I could find no way to change the font in the editor (or anywhere else) and the default font is one I usually avoid (like this one, here…). Since my R_LIBS_USER was unset, this means it could not find my packages, which is a bit of an obstable to put it mildly. Worse, it took the “Documents” directory to be the home directory, so the global.

I could find no way to start R with a given working directory, so any local customisations with. There were worst things to contend with, however. In the graphs he plot region was a tiny fraction of the real estate and the border regions dominated, but I guess that’s what happens. I did try it in a laptop with a standard small screen and not having the equivalent of SDI mode make it feel very cramped.

My first brush with rstudio was not all that positive, sadly.

Which version of rstudio for mac os x