What IDEs are available for R in Linux? [closed] - r

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What good IDEs are there for R in Linux?
I've tried Rcmdr and Eclipse, but neither seems to have the same usability as Tinn-R in Windows. Are there any other options?

A newcomer to the scene, which IMO looks very promising - and downright baller - relative to other existing IDEs like Rattle and JGR, is RStudio. It's free software, is cross-platform, looks very polished, and even has features like automatic refactoring.
Update 2012-04-12: I've been running it for a bit on our DB server, and I love that it's a web app that saves your sessions, resume-able from anywhere else. Plotting requires not only no X tunneling or png-writing but is easier to use than out-of-the-box R. Extremely easy to get up and running, and it comes with packages for Debian/Ubuntu (which I use).
The company/development is moving pretty fast, aiming to be the de facto standard IDE for all R users. If I'm gushing, it's probably because I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the IDE after a long time of using sub-par IDEs, not just for R but for plenty of other languages. So this was a bit out of the blue. I still need more time to really dig into it but I like what I'm seeing so far.

JGR isn't bad:
http://rforge.net/JGR/
Most people I know rave about Emacs + ESS:
http://ess.r-project.org/
But it's not quite the same thing as Tinn-R.
Along different lines ...
If you're looking at a high level functions for data mining, then Rattle is an option:
http://rattle.togaware.com/
and another high level app for interactive plotting:
http://code.google.com/p/playwith/

I have found that the Emacs-ESS combination is well worth the learning curve. I enjoy being able to:
have code and R console side by side
send the current line, paragraph, file, or function to the R console without touching the mouse
easily interact with R sessions on remote computers
enjoy all the editing abilities of Emacs
Here's the website for the project:
http://ess.r-project.org/
Here's a helpful document about ESS in particular:
http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/Refs/ess.pdf

Brand new IDE out there (as of Feb 2011) is http://www.rstudio.org/. Seems very promising from what I've seen so far.

Although Eclipse was mentioned by the OP, I do not know if he ment it with the StatET plugin.
Eclipse with StatET is a really great IDE besides e.g. EmacsSpeaksStatistics (ESS), but as in other environments the user have to learn it's the basic usage first. The only handicap of this IDE could be the relatively high resources requirements as based on Java, but this makes the program OS independent of course.
Why I really would suggest to take the time to learn use StatET efficiently (cauction: very subjective list!):
be able to run your code really fast and easily with comfigurable shortcuts (by Ctrl+r by default),
thanks to the script editor and running environment is heavily integrated, debuging and reviewing your code cannot be easier,
configurabled environments by default (e.g.: R scripts),
you may define templates for frequent commands and those's environment (e.g.: loop, if conditions etc),
highly customizable syntax highlight,
TeXlipse integrated to view and edit tex code with ease (LaTeX support for Eclipse),
Roxygen support for literate programming (very handy at package development to automatically generate Rd files (manuals) from inline comments),
easily extendable with othet Eclipse plugins (e.g.: spell checking, (SQL) database management, image viewer, running external programs like Sweave).
A nice guide to read is A Guide to Eclipse and the R plug-in StatET by Longhow Lam.

Gedit + RGedit plugin + Snippets plugin

You've suggested eclipse; there is a plugin called StatEt which work quite well (even Sweave is supported!).

There is a KDE 4 based IDE called RKward. It's nice because of:
Workspace Browser
Integrating the R console
data.frames editor
Syntax colored editor
GUI frontend for installing CRAN packages

For my case, I would recommend RKward for linux, it is a KDE. I've been using RStudio in Windows, but when I switched to Ubuntu, I find RKward easy to use, and has a good interface.
You can create a data frame without coding it with data.frame() function.

If you are used to Eclipse, StatET (mentioned by mbq) is probably the right choice for you.
That being said I have a more exotic choice to offer that you might want to consider, if you like auto suggestion and pure syntax highlighting is not enough for you. At least for me auto completion of R-Code did not work with StatET.
Now I use Komodo Edit with Sciviews-K and R64. Sending Code from editor to R works really well and the editor offers auto-completion for R-Code which is really nice – in particular if you are new to R. I work on a Mac, but it should be easy to setup for Linux too.
I think it has lost some popularity because it wasn't to stable in the past, but at I feel it's much better now and it hardly crashes in my setup. So you might wanna give it a chance too.
EDIT: If you work on Mac Textmate with the corresponding R bundle might be interesting, too. Recently I am about to switch to Textmate. If you don't care about the $45 for textmate, it's probably the most stable choice I tested so far. But it's only available on a Mac. But hey I am really amazed by this editor (and as you can see I like testing setups ;).
EDIT: I realize this thread is still being read by someone, so I definitely need to mention RStudio. It came out of nowhere and quickly became the choice of a lot of people. And it's well deserved. It still has some bugs (like not being able to stop RSessions) but it has tremendous auto-complete with context help. But at least on my setup (Mac) it's more stable than StatET / Eclipse. Sweave and ROxygen is not really supported yet, but the developers are very active. Definitely worth trying.
EDIT II: Because it's fun to track this here's another edit. RStudio continues to win more and more users. The combination of RStudio, Roxygen2 and particularly knitr integration has likely been the largest contribution to this development. While Rstudio was rather used by applied users and in teaching and has improved to dramatically that there's isn't many situations in which another IDE / editor is a better choice. Being maried to ESS seems like to only valid reason left to not use it. Also the documentation of its ecosystem is just great. The latest: Package development by Hadley http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/description.html and his advanced programming http://adv-r.had.co.nz/

I strongly recommend learning emacs+ess, but for a more modern-looking interface you can try RKward: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/rkward/index.php?title=Main_Page.

I use Geany in combination with R. Geany provides a terminal in which one can start an R session and shortcuts an be defined in order to send highlighted text to the terminal.
www.geany.org

RGedit, great tool if you're keen on GNOME default text editor. Lacks autocompletion in script mode, though... but you can define snippets in a separate plugin (Snippets)... You can send code directly to R session running in the terminal window, tabbed multiple R sesions, there are several GUI templates for common data analysis (t-test, correlation), long story short, take a look at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rgedit/
Few months ago (when I gave my blogging skills a try), I wrote a review for RGedit, here's a link (and a little bit of self-advertising):
http://psy-stat.com/?p=12
EDIT:
Oh, and you can use Geany and set it up so you can send code chunks to R session... I've never done it, but I know it's manageable!
EDIT #2:
here's a helpful link: http://sgsong.blogspot.com/2010/08/integrating-r-with-geany.html

This might be what you're looking for. It integrated Komodo and the SciViews package. I found it a bit too fiddley (I prefer vi) but if you're looking for a full blown IDE/editor for R in Linux it's pretty close to Tinn-R for Windows and it's written by the same guys!
Link:
http://www.sciviews.org/SciViews-K/index.html

Rattle: http://rattle.togaware.com/

Emacs with ESS. Probably not as polished as Eclipse, but I do like it.

Personnaly, I use gedit and my console. It works great :)

Related

Qt Game Editor - Build Game to Executable?

I apologize in advance for my overall "noobness." This is my first question on stack overflow, and I am quite new to Qt, and game editor programming as well. That said, I do feel that my programming skill is not too far behind.
I've been looking for a question like this for two days, both on and off this website, and haven't found a single one. That could be because I don't know the right words to describe what I'm looking for simply.
I am beginning to build a simple game editor and engine with Qt. Please do not give the response of "Do you really want to make a game editor/engine" or "don't". I have my reasons why I am sure this is what I want to create. My question has to do with the "export to executable" or "build" feature that editors have. I've been trying to wrap my head around it, but I don't know how I would even begin to make that work. For all I know it could be one line of code, or ten-thousand.
Can someone please just point me in the right direction for what kind of programming I would need to do to make that work? If it's difficult and involves concepts I don't already know, that is actually kind of a good thing, because it means more learning for me. I just need some direction.
Thank you!
Alone "If it's difficult and involves concepts I don't already know" is enough to close this question. As if we know what you know and don't know...
Game editors are in general separated from the actual game building process that creates an executable as the final product. This is due to the overall complexity of putting all parts of the production chain into a single piece of software.
That said you can "connect" an editor to the building tools that you have to use in order to produce an executable. There are examples for this like the Unity SDK (including Unity Engine, Unity Editor etc.).
A huge exception to this general practice is Adventure Game Studio, which went open-source since not that long ago. I do believe that AGS is using .NET and C# in particular. It is almost all-in-one package including a built-in tool for generating executables from its custom language and adding the engine to it. It seems that this is what you are looking for though the complexity of such piece of software might be intimidating. If it's too much you can of course simply try to seamlessly add external building tools to your editor. Qt Creator is a nice example for this as well as probably 99% of all IDEs out there - editor simply provides the interface to interact with the building tools which are not part of it.
Last but not least you have to consider the maintenance that will be required in the future. Integrating the building infrastructure in your editor might seem like a good idea at first however what happens when you want to replace relatively large chunks of code in either your editor or this same building infrastructure, or even in both? My suggestion is to create the editor and just add an interfacing mechanism to existing building tools, which can easily be changed without ruining your editor's code or the one that represents your set of building tools.
In practice game editors do not build games to executable, they merely package game scripts and resources into a format the already implemented game executable can read. The game executable is not created by the game editor, it is implemented conventionally.
That being said, you might want to compile game scripts to native - in that case you must bundle the used compiled with the game, and invoke it from a child process to compile the script code to a shared library plugin, which you can dynamically load and use in the game engine. There is no magic here, whether it is a game or any other application, it is the same basic stuff.
In short, the game editor does not build executables - compilers do. Not unless you want, in addition to a game engine, also create your own C++ compiler too ;)

Matlab like debugging tool for Julia

I am writing a big project in Julia at the moment and the only option that I found to debug this code is Debug.jl. It is sooo(!) overwhelming to debug this code without a debugger like the one MATLAB has.
Are there any such debugging tools? I could adopt them even if they are in alpha stage.
Anyone has timeline estimates as to when they are planned to appear?
There is work in progress by Keno Fischer (one of the core Julia developers) on a debugger called Gallium.jl.
This is a very complicated piece of work, due to the nature of Julia as a JIT-compiled language; for example, as one piece, it will include a C++ REPL! As I understand it, there are still some technical issues that prevent it being used, but it will hopefully be available for general consumption "soon".
See this video for a demo, and this discussion on the julia-dev mailing list for the latest news.

Which free merge utility is used by Drupalians?

I've tried Araxis merge and it's good to use. However it is too costly.
I need only file and folder diff. I also need merge for two files.
Although this Wikipedia page lists all of the free tools but it is really difficult to conclude which tool will be best.
I'm curious which is the most recommeded free merge tool for Drupalians!
I'm not sure Drupalian have specific needs merging-wise compared to other web makers :D
Try Kdiff3 ( http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/ )which is dead simple.
Sorry I talked about opendiff which I use on my mac but it doesn't seem to be available for windows. But if you are on mac it is part of the original install.
Command-line diff (together with colordiff), vimdiff, emacs has quite good implementation as well...

How can I contribute to base R in small ways?

Occasionally I see small ways I could improve either R (recently the IQR command) and R documentation (just this week perhaps elaborating differences among and better interconnecting aggregate, tapply, and by). But I don't see a way to really make that contribution back. I looked into the developer site and it seems that my options are either to attempt to become a full fledged developer or create packages, neither of which fit what I wish to accomplish.
I did propose IQR changes on the R mailing list but got no response so I figure that's going nowhere.
And to clarify, I'm talking about base-R. Additional packages are another matter.
Any tips?
Send (or CC) to r-devel. Traffic is quite high on r-help, and things can be overlooked there.
File a bug under the wishlist category detailing the improvement you would like to see.
Having filed the bug, try to provide a patch against the R code and or documentation as appropriate. I've done this before where there was a problem or infelicity in R, supplied a patch and a fix to the help files/manual and had the changes accepted (after suitable modification) by R Core.
If it is an addition to the R code base, you are going to have to show that there is a real pressing need for the addition. Basically you are asking R Core to maintain your code in perpetuity, and they are unlikely to do that unless you can demonstrate a need.
If it is an addition, look for a popular R package that does similar/related things and suggest to the package maintainer that they include your function. That way you don't need to start a whole package for something simple but contribute your code. There are several, popular, *misc packages on CRAN for example.
If you want to contribute fixes to the R documentation and/or manuals, provide patches to the sources. You can find the sources at svn.r-project.org/R
Hopefully that gives you some ideas. Patches and code always help!
How about patches to existing packages?
How about open bug reports on packages? R-Forge projects don't seem to use the issue trackers much, but some folks on the RPostgreSQL team I'm on enabled it (where it is hosted on Google Code), and it has been helpful -- see here. And we had a really useful inflow of fresh blood with a rocking new developer from Japan, probably in part because of the visibility of the project there.
In essence, try to find a project / group / team to become acquainted with and join. In that sense, this is just like any other Open Source project. The r-devel list (gmane view) is a good place for R development in general.
The R Core team, on the other hand, is a little more closed and per invitation only and unlikely to change. So be it, for better or worse. It has worked so far, and hence I am not among those who bemoan this loudly.

The Clean programming language in the real world?

Are there any real world applications written in the Clean programming language? Either open source or proprietary.
This is not a direct answer, but when I checked last time (and I find the language very interesting) I didn't find anything ready for real-world.
The idealist in myself always wants to try out new languagages, very hot on my list (apart from the aforementioned very cool Clean Language) is currently (random order) IO, Fan and Scala...
But in the meantime I then get my pragmatism out and check the Tiobe Index. I know you can discuss it, but still: It tells me what I will be able to use in a year from now and what I possibly won't be able to use...
No pun intended!
I am using Clean together with the iTasks library to build websites quite easy around workflows.
But I guess another problem with Clean is the lack of documentation and examples: "the Clean book" is from quite a few years back, and a lot of new features don't get documented except for the papers they publish.
http://clean.cs.ru.nl/Projects page doesn't look promising :) It looks like just another research project with no real-world use to date.
As one of my professors at college has been involved in the creation of Clean, it was no shock he'd created a real world application. The rostering-program of our university was created entirely in Clean.
The Clean IDE and the Clean compiler are written in Clean. (http://wiki.clean.cs.ru.nl/Download_Clean)
Cloogle, a search engine for Clean libraries, syntax, etc. (like Hoogle for Haskell) is written in Clean. Its source is on Radboud University's GitLab instance (web frontend; engine).

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