RStudio

Even though the default installation of R offers a very basic graphic user interface (GUI), it lacks many modern functionality offered by other programming languages. RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for the R programming language, which provides modern tooling for your data analysis tasks.

RStudio Server IDE, running in a browser

Some of the tools offered in RStudio include:

• Syntax highlighting, code suggestions and autocompletion.
• Dedicate tabs for viewing the environmental variables, documentation and plots.
• R console tab.
• A tab for your code scripts with direct code execution and debugging.
• A vast set of customization options - from font size and themes, to toggling between different installed versions of R (and Python).
• RMarkdown and Quarto, which allow creating fully reproducible documents, presentations and reports using rich text formatting, as well as including code execution results.

Another great thing about RStudio - it has two different versions: a local version and a server-based version. While the server-based alternative is most commonly used for large-scale computing on powerful servers, we will utilize it to build a docker container, to ensure that the results can be exactly reproduced as they are in these notes.

RStudio is free to use.