[R] Moving to Mac OS X

[Noah Silverman]

Hi,

I'm a daily user of both mac and Linux so wanted to offer some thoughts:


1) R runs great on a Mac.  There is a standard install from the cran 
website that has a nice GUI built into it.  You can do things like drag 
files to the console and it will fill in the path name.

2) I like using BBedit for all my programming needs.  IMHO BBedit is the 
most powerful editor I've seen in my many years of programming.  There 
is a small plugin that understands the R language.  My general workflow 
is to write code in BBedit and then run it in R using the "source" 
function.

3) I purposefully chose NOT to install 64bit R.  I have a dual-core 
machine.  With the 32 bit version, R will happily keep one core running 
at 100%, but then I have other core free for my "regular" work.

--
N



On 9/11/09 10:32 AM, Marc Schwartz wrote:
> On Sep 11, 2009, at 12:15 PM, Victor Manuel Garcia Guerrero wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I have been using R on Windows for a long time, but now I am ready to 
>> move to Mac OS X, but I was just wondering if R works better on Mac 
>> than on Windows. This is because I had some memory size issues in the 
>> past.
>>
>> Another question is if some of you know an R editor for Mac (just 
>> like Tinn-R).
>>
>> Thanks.
>
> The notion of "better" is always in the eyes of the useR and will 
> depend upon specific criteria.
>
> OSX can run R in both 32 bit and 64 bit modes and indeed the default 
> OSX download for R provided by Simon installs and supports both. If 
> you use the 32 bit version, then from a memory management standpoint, 
> you will not see demonstrable gains over Windows. However, with the 64 
> bit version, you will avail yourself of a much larger memory address 
> space as compared to running 32 bit R on Windows. That of course 
> presumes that you have a lot of RAM in your Mac to actually take 
> advantage of the larger address space.
>
> The 64 bit memory address space is also available via Linux, with 
> appropriate hardware.
>
>
> You might want to review the R OSX FAQ:
>
>   http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/RMacOSX-FAQ.html
>
> and also note that there is a OSX specific e-mail list:
>
>   https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
>
>
> As far as editors, I am not familiar with the details of Tinn-R, but 
> ESS/Emacs is available for OSX and this is what I use (continuing what 
> I had been using on Linux for the past number of years).  Others will 
> likely be able to provide other recommendations and you might want to 
> search the R-SIG-Mac list archives as no doubt there have been such 
> discussions in the past.
>
> HTH,
>
> Marc Schwartz
>
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