Although I am an Emacs fan, I do realize that Emacs is not the only tool for certain tasks. In particular, scripting for R can be done in many open source ways.

I have already spoken of Emacs, in particular of the Emacs Speaks Statistics project (ESS), which provides for an out-of-the-box R-ready version of Emacs. The big advantage of this solution is that I can switch from one task to the other (i.e. write a post, a research paper, an R script, edit my web site files, or produce slides for my lessons), all the time remaining comfortably within the same editing environment.

An unbiased view of scripting environments for working with R cannot ignore other valid solutions. In particular, one of the most powerful and increasingly popular open source tools is the RStudio package. RStudio is actually much more than a scripting editor for R. Citing the description given by the developers: “RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R. It includes a console, syntax-highlighting editor that supports direct code execution, as well as tools for plotting, history, debugging and workspace management”. Not only, RStudio also provides on-board tools for authoring HTML, PDF, Word Documents, and slide shows. Admittedly a pretty impressive package. In addition, RStudio’s GUI is based upon R-dedicated icon and drop-down menus, which is the main reason why I generally introduce R to beginners using RStudio as the script editor.

Textmate is another open source option worth considering in this context. It is a text editor which can be customized to work with a large number of scripting and programming languages, including R of course. In this respect Textmate provides a comfortable and powerful R scripting environment with a lot of the R functionality, when in R mode, present as pull-down menu options. The only ‘limit’ is that Textmate is available only for MacOSX.

Yet another, cross-platform, powerful, open source text editor is Atom. Defined as: “A hackable text editor for the 21st Century” this has become a favourite among many developers. I personally don’t use Atom, but only because, at a certain point, I decided to commit to some tools, not really having the time to fully explore the potential of all the available options.