🧏 People who code have a tendency to spend a lot of time in various IDEs (Integrated Development Environments). They can be as simple as a text editor or as complex as a full-blown development environment. In this post, I'll go through my two go-to IDE's, RStudio and VScode, and why I switch between them rather than sticking to a single one. ---
@Drmowinckels Nice post! For me the other "killer app" of VS Code (besides git support) is running instances within docker containers (which could be on a server). Feels identical to working locally.
Personally I've switched 100% to VS Code for my own work. I only use RStudio for teaching. The combination of RStudio plugins in VS Code and my own shortcuts make it fine for package development in my experience.
@Drmowinckels both vim and neovim have a built in terminal now, which I agree is an absolute non negotiable item to use R to its fullest with a REPL.
This is not a recommendation exactly but if you’re looking to round out your R editor experience you could give emacs + ESS a go. In particular the way they do help is excellent, and inspired me to try to recreate it in RStudio/VSCode with {rmdocs}.
@milesmcbain Interesting. Whenever I've talked to people about emacs + ESS they've not been particularly happy about how it worked and have been very positive to RStudio when it came along.
@Drmowinckels I was using emacs for a bunch of different stuff at the time and ESS felt like it offered a lot. Though some complexity is added by the fact they’ve tried to generalise it over SAS, Julia, R etc. If you’re only using emacs for R then yeah I can see RStudio being way more attractive.
@Drmowinckels I realised I had all but turned VSCode into vim anyway due to the extensions I am using. And (neo)vim is much more free in terms of how you can create your own tools and automations. For VSCode (and RStudio actually) you’re expected to write and publish a package that contains your extension. It slows things down somewhat. In Vim you just source some code and now things work differently.
I also have some frustration with VSCode’s design - you can’t avoid a mouse completely.
@Drmowinckels, nice read. It mirrors most of my own experiences. I use VS Code(ium) for Julia and Python and RStudio for my R stuff. I do use Neovim quite a bit as well, but as you said, for editing text files. I just can't get the hang of Nvim-R, no matter how many times I've tried. It's a great piece of work, but it just doesn't click with me.
@adamhsparks nice to know my idiosyncrasies are not so idiosyncratic after all! 😊
Ive never tried neovim, its not available on the server i ssh into, which is the main place i use him, as I can't call a UI in there. Maybe I can ask for it, now that we are getting an upgrade from redhat 7 to rocky9... Would be fin to give it a go. Though, as I understand, it needs extensions to really work well, and I am unsure of how much time IT wants to dedicate to that.
@Drmowinckels Your article was a great read! And even though I'm biased towards RStudio, it was interesting to learn about how you use it (and the other IDEs) and where it could be improved.
@ronblum RStudio is basically the IDE that has allowed me to flourish and become opinionated about these things. I think I'll also always have an RStudio bias, even if vscode has certain features that I prefer.
@almenal99@Drmowinckels I’m getting into Neovim at the moment and think, after extensive experience with RStudio and VS Code, that I disagree on its status as IDE! 😝 Especially compared to VS Code I think it’s super promising - it can look incredibly beautiful, great plugins for file trees, syntax highlighting, linting, project search, git integrations. I’m not sure where it stands on the data viewer front. (1/2)
But it’s very fast, which I can’t say for VS Code.
I’m curious why VS Code can be considered an IDE for R but Neovim can’t, considering both need extensions/plugins to become more than a text editor?? (2/2)
Add comment