Appendix E — R Setup

E.1 RStudio

For R, the almost definite choice of IDE is RStudio. You may download and install it from the homepage. The installation and beginning usage is straightforward. RStudio is using the default R console.

Although the best R IDE is RStudio, there are still some people willing to try other options. In the rest part of this section I will briefly describe how to set up R environment using other IDES/platforms.

E.2 `radian`

radian is an alternative console for the R program with multiline editing and rich syntax highlight. One would consider radian as a IPython clone for R, though its design is more aligned to Julia.

radian is a R console. So to install it you should have an installation of R (version 3.4.0 or above). radian is mainly written in Python. Therefore to install it you should have an installation of Python (version 3.6 or above). Then you may use the following command to install radian.

conda install -c conda-forge radian

pip install -U radian

E.2.1 Use the console

First find the path to the console. If you use conda to install radian, the path is <anaconda path>/Scripts/radian.exe. When you directly run the executable file radian.exe, the console will be activated. You may start to run R code.

You may use q() to exit radian.

E.3 VS Code Configuration

The main reference is the official document.

If you would like to use VS Code as your main IDE for R, it is usually recommended to install the following components.

R extension for VS Code by REditorSupport. You may get it through this link, or search for it within VS Code.
Install languageserver in R.

install.packages("languageserver")

radian. This is an alternative R console introduced above. Note that to use radian in VS Code you need to set the rterm variable in VS Code setting to be the path of your radian installation.
httpgd. This is a R package which is for better plotting in VS Code.

install.packages("httpgd")

Running R code is simply sending code to the R terminal. Before running R code, you could create an R terminal via command R: Create R terminal in the Command Palette. If you set radian path, this R terminal will be radian.

Tip

You may adding the following Keyboard Shortcuts to VS Code. These are the same setting used in RStudio which are commonly used. The first two are using alt+- to produce <- and the latter two are using ctrl+shift+m to produce %>%.

{
"key": "alt+-",
"command": "type",
"when": "editorTextFocus && editorLangId =~ /r|rmd|qmd/",
"args": {"text": " <- "}
},
{
"key": "alt+-",
"command": "workbench.action.terminal.sendSequence",
"when": "terminalFocus",
"args": {"text": " <- "}
},
{
"key": "ctrl+shift+m",
"command": "type",
"when": "editorTextFocus && editorLangId =~ /r|rmd|quarto/",
"args": {"text": " %>% "}
},
{
"key": "ctrl+shift+m",
"command": "workbench.action.terminal.sendSequence",
"when": "terminalFocus",
"args": {"text": " %>% "}
},

E.4 Cloud IDE options

There are tons of online IDEs that supports R. The following two are the biggest names.

E.4.1 Posit Cloud (formally RStudio Cloud)

You may directly go to the homepage to use RStudio from cloud. If you don’t use it a lot it should be free.

E.4.2 Google Colab

You may use R in Google Colab. Note that by default R is disabled. You have to use a specific version of Google Colab through colab.to/r. After you get into the system, you may go to Edit->Notebook settings to change Runtime type to be R.

The rest is similar to Jupyter notebook, while the codes are now R codes.