Appendix A. Graphical user interfaces

You turned here first, didn’t you? By default, R provides a simple command-line interface (CLI). The user enters statements at a command-line prompt (> by default), and each command is executed one at a time. For many data analysts, the CLI is one of R’s most significant limitations.

There have been a number of attempts to create more graphical interfaces, ranging from code editors that interact with R (such as RStudio), to GUIs for specific functions or packages (such as BiplotGUI), to full-blown GUIs that allow you to construct analyses through interactions with menus and dialog boxes (such as R Commander).

Several of the more useful code editors are listed in table A.1.

These code editors let you edit and execute R code and include syntax highlighting, statement completion, object exploration, project organization, and online help. A screenshot of RStudio is shown in figure A.1.