[rvanlaar]

I'm not OP.

To me, it's the tooling around it. Everything is done in R-studio and it's focus is to generate statistical documents.

The result is a sub optimum solution. It lacks good tooling around installing and running R programs. R programs don't import, they include. It doesn't make it more readable. R-studio is very Emacs like in the sense that it just lacks a decent editor. Due to R-studio being the default, there's not much support for other editors.

[Mikeb85]

> Due to R-studio being the default, there's not much support for other editors.

But RStudio is amazing... Easily best environment I've used for any programming language (well, except Pharo).

[kafkaIncarnate]

I use Vim with the R command line wrapped around Makefiles. I don't even have RStudio installed. Works great.

I can even pop up an interactive R command prompt session and do whatever I want in it, even quick ggplot2 graphs. Help shows up just as you would expect, and plots pop up in new windows. RStudio is much less advanced than people think it is, it's really just managing R's windows for you and doing generic IDE work. R is doing all the heavy lifting.

If you're wanting a more "import" like thing you might want to look into making R packages instead of scripts. You don't have to submit them to CRAN, and you can execute them pretty simply on the R command line as well.

That being said, it's really not an OOP or software development tool. It's definitely geared toward data science, but you can automate that very well for generating graphs automatically and reporting for whatever reason needed.

[racl101]

Do you have notes or documentation on how to get this working without RStudio? Preferably on a Macbook?

[kafkaIncarnate]

I use Linux, but it should be pretty straightforward on Mac as well. Just type "R" in the command prompt and check the manpage for R itself ("man R").

I'd also look into the "knitr" package, which is what all of the Rmarkdown is based around. So for instance, most of my Makefiles are based around a simple command like:

    R -e "library(knitr); knit2html('index.Rmd')"

Then I just code using VIM on index.Rmd. You can probably set this up however you like with the R command line.

For interactive it literally is just typing "R" in the command prompt. For help, things like "?ggplot", "??knitr", or whatever, so you can open multiple interactive sessions like you were using IPython or something. When you print a plot, it just pops up in a new window.

You can also use "R" to just execute R raw if you are trying to do it without Rmarkdown. I just prefer the HTML output. Pretty sure all the RStudio RMarkdown stuff just calls knitr as well.

The output looks the same as anything on RPubs (and there is a way to publish to RPubs, I used to have to do that at one point), random one from the first page:

https://rpubs.com/mnguy1019/881028

[lottin]

Emacs has had excellent R support since much before R-studio came around. In fact to me R-studio has always felt like a stand-alone implementation of ESS (minus Emacs).