Appendix A. Graphic 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 the user 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.

Table A.1. Integrated development environments and syntax editors

Name

URL

Eclipse with StatET plug-in http://www.eclipse.org and http://www.walware.de/goto/statet
ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics) http://ess.r-project.org/
Komodo Edit with SciViews-K plug-in http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/ http://www.sciviews.org/SciViews-K/
JGR http://www.rforge.net/JGR/
RStudio http://www.rstudio.org
Tinn-R (Windows only) http://www.sciviews.org/Tinn-R/
Notepad++ with NppToR (windows only) http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/npptor/