[Rd] Halfway through writing an "IDE" with support for R; Proof of concept, and request for suggestions.

[irederik m@iii@g oii oib@@et]

On Sat, Jun 15, 2019 at 01:13:07PM +1200, Abby Spurdle wrote:
>> What about Atom, VS Code and the like? Or what about taking a project
>> that meets most of the constraints and pushing to cover all of them,
>> or even forking it and modifying the part you don't like?
>
>I'm not prepared to endorse GitHub affiliated software.
>
>	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

I'm trying to figure out what (of many possibilities) is wrong with GitHub.

Also, do good programmers really use IDEs? For me the problem is the "integrated" part; the more stuff is bundled together in one package (terminal, editor, window manager, build system), the more annoying it's going to be that I can't use the terminal/editor/window-manager/build-system of my preference.

When I use R, I use it on the command-line with a general-purpose terminal multiplexer, terminal, text editor, (tiling) window manager, and so on. The text editor and R are both running in separate windows in a terminal multiplexer session. I have custom key-bindings in my terminal and text editor which help me move text back and forth between R and the editor, and to do common tasks like sourcing the current file that I'm editing. For me this is much more flexible than anything I could get in a coherent package like RStudio, or something like what Abby is working on. For example, in my setup I never have to use the mouse, which is great for me.

Although Abby's IDE looks awesome, and like a fun project, I felt obliged to weigh in with my own opinions. Not that I'm a very good programmer, but I feel an IDE would make me worse. It seems more like a valuable tool for introducing beginners to the language. We have RStudio, which already fills this niche pretty well (to echo Iñaki).

I'm not even quite sure why I'm writing this, but I hope it may be vaguely useful...

Best wishes,

Frederick