Well, I'm going to start my Master's in september and I'll need R programming skills for about 3 courses. I've only had some training and experience with Matlab so far, so I'm currently reading some tutorials and docs to make the switch. I'm one day in and right now, I'm a little frustrated with my IDE choices. I've seen a couple of slim editors that extend the R GUI by one or two features, but nothing too big to really make a difference. What annoys me to no end is that there seems to be no GUI offering an equivalent to Matlab's "Workspace" - an overview of the variables you're currently using. Yes, there's the ls() function, but that just gives me a very crude idea of what I'm working with - no information about variable types and values at-a-glance, no instant additional information like means, median, etc. of vectors, like in Matlab.

I've tried Eclipse but that thing is a bit like the antichrist to set up on a windows machine, it drove me nuts yesterday and I'm not sure if I want to rage more just to get a slow IDE which STILL doesn't seem to offer the features I want.

Is there anything like that for R out there?

I use Eclipse on my linux box, but I know what you mean about getting it to run in a Windows environment.

Time to dual boot Linux?

And what's so hard about running Eclipse on Windows? You just download Java from Sun Oracle and install it. Next you download Eclipse (make sure you pick up the correct download for windows and not linux, also remember about x86/x86_64) unzip it and run it. If you need additional stuff you go to Help / Install new software.. and enter a url for the new plugin's update site ( if it takes too long try unchecking Contact all update sites during install... at the bottom of the wizard).

A problem arises when plugin you want to use requires linux specifically.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for linux. But I didn't find getting elcipse to run on win that much different.

I'd never heard about R before the OP, from a google search I found this StatET for R, don't know if this is what you tried to use.

Apparently, this is the url you enter in eclipse's Install new software dialog if you want to install it as a plug-in



There's more info on their web site in Installation section.

ps. When downloading Eclipse, I think Eclipse Classic is a good starting point

R is an S (Matlab uses S) dialect. It's quite powerful, but takes a while getting used to.

Oh, I'd done all the good things: I installed Eclipse classic, had it install the StatET thing, thought I had installed rJ and all the good stuff that's described on the CRAN website, in the tutorial pdf, etc pp. but it still didn't run. I kept getting error messages when trying to actually run the R console in Eclipse. Told me something about rJ not working properly and a long list of other stuff in some sort of elaborate error message window.

I just deleted Eclipse in rage, and well, if it doesn't work anyway, I'm not gonna rage about it all day.

I saw on some R blog that there *is* a workspace-like overview thing, but the picture showed a mac version of the gui (possibly an extension package) and I have been unable to find a candidate for the command to open that window. There's certainly no option in the gui that does this. The picture:



I'm now going to try Rkward, at least I get coloured syntax there. Why is everything R programmed for UNIX systems though? Grrr.

Edit: It's kinda hilarious how people take the time to compile shit for Windows but are too stupid to see to it that the directories are targeted properly. Rkward doesn't work because something here assumes something was somewhere where it is clearly not. Bullshit everywhere.