Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
RStudio is a new open-source IDE for R which we’re excited to announce the availability of today. RStudio has interesting features for both new and experienced R developers including code completion, execute from source, searchable history, and support for authoring Sweave documents.
RStudio runs on all major desktop platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, or Fedora) and can also run as a server which enables multiple users to access the IDE using a web browser.
A couple of screenshots (click here for more screenshots):
The version of RStudio available today is a beta (v0.92) and is released under the GNU AGPL license. We’re hoping for lots of input and dialog with the R community to help make the product as good as it can be!
More details on the project as well as download links can be found at: http://www.rstudio.org.
88 comments
February 28, 2011 at 11:10 am
Chris
Looks nice. Although a getting started tutorial would be really useful (unless there already is one).
February 28, 2011 at 1:18 pm
figital
Very excited about how easy this was to install on a debian-ish distro, how intuitive the initial release UX is, and what I can tell is coming soon down the pike.
Was wondering what I was going to do with this stuff!! … https://github.com/figital/stats/blob/master/gas-prices.csv
February 28, 2011 at 3:23 pm
Shreyas
Liked Rstudio!!! Great job guys!!!
February 28, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Oren
First impression: brilliant!
I played with RStudio for a few minutes and it seems to work great. I’ve been a happy user of a Geany+terminal combination (on Ubuntu) and I didn’t think anything better would come up any time soon, but RStudio seems to do all I need in a very convenient way. I’ll play with it more tomorrow at work.
Good job, and good luck!
March 1, 2011 at 5:12 am
Liviu
I’m also a long-time Geany+VTE user, but to join the chorus, Rstudio looks very promising. On first try I had very few design-changing ideas, which usually means a good sign for the software. :) Keep up the good work!
February 28, 2011 at 5:45 pm
Krista
This looks like great software!
The one feature I use a lot and would really miss if I migrated is the arguments line that appears at the bottom of R scripts on a Mac. (For example, if you typed read.table(), read.table(file, header=FALSE, . . . ) appears at the bottom of the pane.) Is that something you’re planning to add?
March 1, 2011 at 8:02 am
jjallaire
Krista,
Yes, we definitely want to add more “automagic” context-sensitive help to the console and source panes. Stay tuned!
J.J.
February 28, 2011 at 6:54 pm
Tom
Fantastic work!
I’m going to switch to Rstudio.
Keep on going!
February 28, 2011 at 7:04 pm
Michael Bishop
If there is a way to put the source code and the console side by side, I don’t see it. This is a HUGE drawback for those with wide screens or multiple monitors.
March 1, 2011 at 8:02 am
jjallaire
Michael,
Not yet, but we’ve already heard this request from a number of users and will definitely do this in a future release.
J.J.
February 28, 2011 at 7:12 pm
Rob
This looks beautiful, guys. Can’t tell you how excited I was to see this software released. I’m sure the rest of my department will be excited as well.
February 28, 2011 at 11:24 pm
Yva
just brilliant!
February 28, 2011 at 11:40 pm
Theo
This is such a wonderful addition to the R world, especially for the GNU/Linux platforms.
March 1, 2011 at 4:13 am
Oyvind Foshaug
Fantastic job! Finally an editor for Linux that works out of the box!
March 1, 2011 at 5:19 am
Sean
It’s great.Thanks for your job.
Would you make the autocompletion more powerful? Besides the objects and R functions, if the autocompletion can auto complete any words that occurs in source code, the editing will more efficient.
March 1, 2011 at 5:20 am
Michal
Big congratulations! RStudio looks, and works, really great. Keep up the good work! I think this will be the GUI of choice for my R classes.
March 1, 2011 at 1:01 pm
Ruud
Looks great :) Any plans/options to make RStudio available for PPC (i.e. non-intel based) Macs?
March 1, 2011 at 2:43 pm
jjallaire
We don’t currently have plans to do this but certainly try to if enough users ask for it. Note thought that one signficiant issue we may not be able to overcome is that the Qt Library which we depend on isn’t straightforward to use with PPC out of the box.
September 30, 2012 at 6:19 am
Robert Hagan
Has there been any recent progress in making Rstudio available for a powerpc or ppc?
September 30, 2012 at 7:05 am
jjallaire
Hi there,
If you are thinking PowerPC Macs we don’t have a version available for that platform (and our most important user-interface library doesn’t support PowerPC so there’s no way for us to do it). If you are running Linux then we don’t have PowerPC binaries however I do know of some users compiling RStudio from source on for a Linux PowerPC distro.
J.J.
March 1, 2011 at 4:52 pm
teucer
Brilliant Job!!!
I have been a long time user of ESS and recently switched to Eclipse+Statet.
I would like to make some suggestions:
*arranging the panes (Eclipse)
*changing shortcuts (Eclipse)
*smart indent (ESS)
*user should be able to change colors (Eclipse)
*smart tab completion (e.g. suggest first the most used commands)
*outline (Eclipse)
*data.frame editor (Matlab)
*debugging (Matlab)
*hover (Eclipse)
*fonts
March 2, 2011 at 7:31 am
jjallaire
Yes! We definitely want to do just about all of the features you mention. We want to both have a tool that is approachable for newbies but also has all of the hardcore source editing and dev workflow stuff we’ve all come to expect from a decent IDE.
March 4, 2011 at 1:58 pm
Lohith Madireddy
Wonderful job!! This sure is what I have been looking for since more than 2 years. Although I sticked to kate on Ubuntu after trying many things, I am now preferring RStudio. Thanks for developing such a great tool.
As was said, I would like to have the ability to move panes. It’s very useful to me since I can have source code pane on one of my screens and the R console on the other (after stretching R studio across two screens) and it makes things easier to program and debug. I hope to see this addition in the next release!
March 4, 2011 at 4:33 pm
jjallaire
Lohith,
Thanks for the feedback, we are definitely hoping to have pane customization available soon!
Best,
J.J.
March 2, 2011 at 9:31 pm
Glen210
Very nice. Is there a way to open two instances at the same time? That way I can work in one while the other is running a lengthy program.
March 2, 2011 at 10:33 pm
jjallaire
Unfortunately there isn’t currently a way to do this however it’s certainly something we’d like to support in the future.
March 2, 2011 at 11:05 pm
Xu Wang
Thank you! Thank you!!
You guys produced an excellent app and even more impressive you are setting the tone from the start for being responsive to your users. It’s such a joy to see! Thank you and best of luck!
Xu Wang
March 3, 2011 at 4:53 am
Bj
Very nice !
A small suggestion: resolving problems with accents in the R console..
March 3, 2011 at 8:00 am
jjallaire
Hi Benjamin,
Thanks for the suggestion. Could you give us just a bit more detail on the problem — I’m imaginging you mean that accent characters don’t display properly in the console but if you give us a couple of specific examples of the content that doesn’t display properly it will be easier for us to discover the problem.
Thanks!
March 4, 2011 at 3:32 am
Bj
Hi !
(is in French)
Rstudio :
“R est un logiciel libre livr� sans AUCUNE GARANTIE.
Vous pouvez le redistribuer sous certaines conditions.
Tapez ‘license()’ ou ‘licence()’ pour plus de d�tails.”
R 2.12.2 :
“R est un logiciel libre livré sans AUCUNE GARANTIE.
Vous pouvez le redistribuer sous certaines conditions.
Tapez ‘license()’ ou ‘licence()’ pour plus de détails.”
It just appears in the responses of the R console, we can set accents in all other cases !
Thanks ! RStudio is Great !
March 20, 2011 at 4:13 pm
nexuslm
same throuble in spanish:
“R es un proyecto colaborativo con muchos contribuyentes.
Escriba ‘contributors()’ para obtener m�s informaci�n y
‘citation()’ para saber c�mo citar R o paquetes de R en publicaciones”
March 3, 2011 at 11:57 am
José Luis
Congratulations, It’s a great job. But it has a problem with tildes like in ” josé”. I always has used rkward on linux and TinnR and JGR on windows, but this project maybe replace them in my computers..
March 3, 2011 at 12:58 pm
Gregory
This IDE really makes organizing and executing R code much easier. Thank you.
Just a small suggestion to implement some form of document bookmarking, where it’s easy to jump to certain sections of the code quickly without huge amounts of scrolling.
Excellent overall.
March 3, 2011 at 9:10 pm
jjallaire
Gregory,
Thanks for the suggestion — we will definitely do bookmarking at some point (hopefully not too far off!).
J.J.
March 3, 2011 at 1:57 pm
Tony
Great looking product! I’ve recommended it to colleagues. I’d just like to add my voice to those others that ask for the ability to make source code and console be side by side. I appreciate the Linux support! Keep up the great work and I will continue to spread the word about this fantastic project!
March 3, 2011 at 9:10 pm
jjallaire
Tony,
Thanks for the comment. We realize that console and source side-by-side is a must have. We’re on it!
J.J.
March 3, 2011 at 9:47 pm
Matt
Wow! I’m loving RStudio so far. Thanks so much for enriching the community.
March 4, 2011 at 4:38 am
Tomaz
Great job people! Your first release, and it already looks stable and very useful! Well done!
But similar to other people, I’ll pretend it’s Christmas and make a wish ;)
What I really miss in all R-centric IDE’s made so far is a modern debugging environment:
– breakpoints
– stepping through code (by line, to cursor, through blocks of code, to next breakpoint…)
– watches
– break-on-parameter-value
– an easy overview of current values of variables – both with a cursor-hover in code pane, and a pane with a list of variables (like “locals” window in Microsoft’s IDE’s).
Current debugging in R is very much like it escaped from the 80’s, although the “debug” package puts it in the early 90’s. The only IDE that sort of supports modern debugging is Revolution, but the stuff you guys made seems much more suited for “regular” (meaning non-programming) R work.
Again, great job! Keep it up!
-Tomaz-
March 4, 2011 at 7:36 am
jjallaire
Hi Tomaz,
Yes, we are aware that having a debugger with the features you describe would be highly desirable. I can’t guarantee exactly when, but we will definitely do this!
J.J.
March 4, 2011 at 10:02 am
Carlos
Very nice piece of work. A must have.
March 5, 2011 at 3:17 am
fmark
Just wanted to say thank you for a lovely piece of software that has massive potential. If you are the same guys who developed HomeSite it will surely be awesome :)
March 5, 2011 at 11:34 pm
Juan Pablo
Great work! Congrats!
March 6, 2011 at 5:07 am
Brandon Z
I teach intro stats in R, and have long lamented the lack of an integrated cross-platform IDE that is inviting. This more than fits the bill. As a researcher often on the go however, I lament that Rstudio Server does not run properly on the iPad/iPhone browsers. It loads and shows up, but editing the where one needs to enter commands/code is pretty much impossible. If this could be rectified, this could make Rstudio THE tool that many itinerant researchers have been looking for so that we can work in R without doing the VERY clumsy automated dropbox to home computer to R to dropbox to iPad dance.
March 6, 2011 at 7:00 am
jjallaire
Hi Brandon,
Yees, we definitely would like RStudio to work on the iPad. We have a couple of issues to work through:
1) In the source pane our editor component doesn’t currently support the iPad (but will, see: https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/issuesearch?state=open&q=ipad#issue/37)
2) In the console pane we use contentEditable (which isn’t supported by iOS). There are a couple of possible fixes for this which we are investigating as well.
It’s on our radar and we will address as soon as we get past these obstacles.
J.J.
March 6, 2011 at 1:30 pm
enrico
Very nice piece of software!
Under Ubuntu the installation routine worked flawless and the whole system work like a charm.
I’m starting these days to work with R and RStudio really gave a boost to the experience! Thank you very much!
I’m already writing an email to my advisory suggesting him to give a try!
Keep Going with this nice work
Enrico
March 7, 2011 at 11:01 am
David
What an excellent project. Good design, high standard, good website and excellent support.
I’ve tried quite a few editors (currently Emacs/ESS), but RStudio is very appealing.
If you can implement half of what has already been suggested then I should think RStudio will become the default editor for R for most people.
What would make it hard for me to leave Emacs though is the integration with Auctex/Reftex, which are fantastic for sweave documents. Don’t know if you have any plans to develop the sweave side of things?
Anyway – keep up the excellent work!
David
March 8, 2011 at 7:14 am
jjallaire
Hi David,
Yes, we are definitely going to beef up the Sweave feature! Probably not in the next release but sometime later this year. When we start working on this I’ll ping you back to make sure we capture the the types of things that you are looking for.
J.J.
March 8, 2011 at 11:07 pm
greg
This is fantastic! I set up the webserver in a spare linux box, and it worked perfectly.
March 9, 2011 at 10:43 pm
Визуализация данных » RStudio: новая интегрированная среда разработки для R
[…] Запись в официальном блоге RStudio Inc […]
March 10, 2011 at 3:23 pm
Lutz
First of all: great work. I really like the interface. And it was really about time for a good R editor.
One small thing which is bothering me: why didnt you include the option to export pdfs with custom sizes? just two fields were you can define the width and height of an exported pdf would be really useful. the standard formats dont really work well for me.
cheers,
Lutz
March 11, 2011 at 6:48 am
jjallaire
Hi Lutz,
Thanks for the feedback. The only reason we didn’t include custom PDF sizes is because we ran out of time before the beta! We have this on a list of improvements that we’ll definitely make prior to shipping v1.0 final.
J.J.
March 11, 2011 at 7:01 am
Brandon Z
Just wanted to follow up by saying both how excellent the product is, how much I am going to use it in my social statistics classes, and how hard I am plugging it with all my colleagues in Political Science and Communications Science.
Also, wanted to express how impressed I am with your incredible response to nearly every post on this blog. Hopefully, Rstudio will become so huge that you will not be able to! (no need to respond to this one!)
One point: is there a way to enable text wrapping in the editor? There should be. When I write an awesomely huge nested function I like automatic wrapping so I can focus on my code and not inserting line breaks myself ;-)
All the best. Great job!
March 11, 2011 at 7:07 am
jjallaire
Brandon,
Just wanted you to know that text-wrapping in the editor for R scripts is under development right now so you shouldn’t have to wait long for this!
J.J.
March 11, 2011 at 2:25 pm
Le blog du Blogueur
[…] plus utilisées, on y comptera comme toujours MacOS X, Windows et GNU/Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.). La première bêta de RStudio est sortie il y a peu sous licence GNU AGPL et la communauté scientifique suit déjà le développement du projet avec […]
March 11, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Liv
For info, I’ve just created an entry for RStudio on AlternativeTo [1].
[1] http://alternativeto.net/software/rstudio/
PS I started using RStudio for my projects, and to echo others, it is brilliant! It immediately increased my productivity and provided me with a gentler interface to R. Thank you
March 15, 2011 at 1:24 pm
Joe Lucke
This product has great promise. I would switch immediately, but for one big problem —- all my .Rdata files end up in one giant ~/.Rdata file. I have many projects that are run in separate folders each with its own R icon and local .Rdata file. How do I achieve this setup with RStudio?
March 15, 2011 at 7:38 pm
jjallaire
Joe,
Yes, we are definitely aware this is a major point of inflexibility. We’ll definitley address this issue!
J.J.
March 17, 2011 at 6:09 pm
Kevin Wright
Glossy icons don’t work well.
When I refer to the R Studio “logo”, I mean the blue circle with the white R. The gloss/shine on the logo makes the white R difficult to read, or impossible to read in the case of small icons.
Gloss behind text often has this effect. Please consider helping users read the text by removing the gloss. This will be very helpful for the icons on the task bar.
March 18, 2011 at 2:45 pm
Louis Aslett
Wow! Nothing has made my jaw drop like the RStudio server version just did in quite some time.
The client version still needs a lot addressed as per other comments here, but for me the seamlessness of the server version is quite simply a joy to behold.
Many thanks and keep up the outstanding work!
March 20, 2011 at 11:02 am
Mario
Thanks for the great job from an epidemiologist that is really enjoying your work!
March 23, 2011 at 9:03 pm
Leo
Thank you very much! RStudio is amazing!!!
March 24, 2011 at 2:16 pm
Arda
Thanks for bringing this to us to make using R several times easier.
I appreciate your team’s work and congragulations. This is really amazing
April 1, 2011 at 1:37 pm
Patrick Schnarrenberger
I really like the basic RStudio interface — it’s very nice work and I’ve already recommended the interface to several of my colleagues.
I do have a bug to report, however. Because RStudio only allows one graphical device at a time, calls that create an additional graphical device (e.g., dev.new, windows, quartz) generate an error in RStudio. I first encountered this problem when using the lm.modelAssumptions function from John Curtin’s lmSupport package — I think lm.modelAssumptions uses a call to dev.new to plot its various graphs. Personally, I also like to manually set the size of my graphs by using a call to dev.new, so I’d like to see the ability to create new graphical devices implemented at some point.
Another feature I’d like to see implemented an easy way to export graphics devices from RStudio into other formats besides .png files. I find that I have much better resolution on my graphs with .emf files, so I’ve ended up having to switch back and forth between the regular R GUI and RStudio to achieve my desired resolution quality.
Anyway, looks great! I look forward to the next release!
April 1, 2011 at 4:09 pm
jjallaire
Hi Patrcik,
Thanks for the feedback. We are definitely hoping to improve graphcics/plotting in the way you describe!
J.J.
April 1, 2011 at 5:42 pm
Liv
@Patrick: have you tried first opening a new graphics device first (x11() on Linux and I think windows() on Win)? Here it pops an external (and usual) graphics device that is ‘active’.
April 1, 2011 at 6:18 pm
Patrick Schnarrenberger
Huh, interesting. Apparently dev.new (the platform-independent way of calling a new graphical device, and the way I discovered the bug I reported above) does not work in RStudio, but windows() does. Thanks, Liv, for pointing this out!
April 9, 2011 at 11:05 am
myq
it’s very cool. i love it. but i can’t use it. it crashes every time. fresh install on ubuntu too. after 10 minutes or so, even just an innocuous action such as editing a script causes the whole thing to crash. it’s a great idea and i hope it become stable enough to use soon.
April 9, 2011 at 11:33 am
jjallaire
There were some compatability issues between Qt (our UI library) and some custom GTK themes which caused crashing. Are you by chance running a custom theme? If so this is fixed in the daily build which you can download at: http://www.rstudio.org/download/daily/desktop
Let us know if that resolves the problem. If it doesn’t then just submit a request to our support forum (http://support.rstudio.org) and we’ll follow up in more detail there.
April 9, 2011 at 11:48 am
myq
That might be it. I’ve got the Macbuntu theme installed. But I just installed the server version and using it locally which seems to be just fine. I might actually prefer it that way since I do most of my writing in a wiki running locally as well. cheers and good work!
April 9, 2011 at 1:14 pm
jjallaire
Yup, Macbuntu was one of the themes we saw this with so I’m sure if you install the daily build everything will work fine.
April 10, 2011 at 6:11 am
myq
great to hear you’re on top of it. Actually, I quite like the server-based version. I’ve set it up so that some colleagues around town can use it and I can see great potential for collaborative statistical analysis! I don’t thinks such a thing has existed before… at least not at this level.
April 18, 2011 at 4:46 pm
Majid Einian
Great Work, Thanks a lot.
1. Debugging would be great.
2. Data View does not fix the column headers as we scroll down.
3. Scroll bars do not appear (otherwise scrolling works fine)
4. I have an idea for commands in menus, sth like STATA, but as R is used in different fields with so much commands, there would be profiles like: econometricians, ecologists, etc. , each making some commands available through menus.
April 18, 2011 at 8:59 pm
jjallaire
Hi Majid,
Thanks for the feedback. Debugging is in the works and we will definitely remedy the column headers issue in the dataset view. If you are having troubles with scrollbars we’d love it if you’d post details to http://support.rstudio.org and we’ll follow up from there. In terms of menus, you are correct that to actually capture all of the interesting menu choices would make for quite a project. For the time being we’re focused on the core function but will eventually make available APIs for adding menus, custom UI, etc.
J.J.
April 25, 2011 at 9:19 am
Majid Einian
It seems that my scrollbars problem is because of the theme I use!
BTW, make a facebook page for RStudio, so we can like it there!!!!
April 25, 2011 at 10:00 am
Liviu
You can like RStudio on AlternativeTo [1].
[1] http://alternativeto.net/software/rstudio/
May 13, 2011 at 10:46 am
Jarek
Great job. It is something what I looked for for years. Fast graphic render is what is what I most appreciate…
I also have one suggestion: add individual object removing from workspace. Now only all objects (clear all) can be removed. Also select few objects and removing them at one step could be a good addition. But anyway a great great job. On my first impression (of quality!!) I thought it is a trial of commercial software. But no it is GPL 3. Thanks!
May 13, 2011 at 11:26 am
jjallaire
Jarek,
Thanks for the suggestions. We know that the Workspace pane is pretty thin right now and will definitely be improving it in upcoming releases.
J.J.
August 17, 2011 at 2:43 pm
Natch Nacht
WOw!!! is much better have all the environments in the same window… but, Can I work in it like in R-commander?
August 17, 2011 at 6:26 pm
jjallaire
Hi there,
RStudio and R-Commander have different usage models — they definitely can be used side by side (running R Commander from within traditional R GUI) but as of yet they don’t work directly together.
J.J.
August 18, 2011 at 2:23 pm
Natch Nacht
Thanks, I already have another question… Can I import SPSS data into a variable in Rstudio, or is necessary make a TXT file for it?
August 18, 2011 at 3:19 pm
jjallaire
Hi there,
I don’t have special knowledge of SPSS import issues, but you should check out the read.spss function of the foreign package to see if it does what you need:
http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/foreign/html/read.spss.html
J.J.
August 18, 2011 at 9:18 pm
Natch Nacht
Thanks a lot J.J.
I like Rstudio as much as SPSS and MATLAB.
Regards
September 15, 2011 at 1:12 pm
ciloman
please create a native port for freebsd. please…..
August 3, 2012 at 12:47 pm
James M.
Hear, hear. FreeBSD is excellent; Rstudio is excellent. The two together, no doubt also excellent.
August 3, 2012 at 1:00 pm
jjallaire
Some folks from Ubalo (http://ubalo.com) have been working on getting RStudio to compile on FreeBSD. There is an open github pull request for this which we plan to take once we have a contributor agreement from them:
https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/pull/15
J.J.
May 26, 2013 at 7:55 am
igitur
I have windows 8 and would like to use R-Studio – is that possible or do I have to face various problems if I do so, cause it does not say if the actual version is comparable?
It would be great if somebody could let me know what she/he experienced.
Thanks a lot!
May 26, 2013 at 9:36 am
jjallaire
Yes, RStudio works on Windows 8.
J.J.
February 5, 2014 at 8:46 pm
R Studio and "Advanced R Development" | Patient 2 Earn
[…] and IDEs for R for awhile, but RStudio really caught my eye recently. It was introduced way back in 2011and is an open source project maintained on Github. One basic, but particularly appealing […]