1.4 Alternatives to RStudio
Although RStudio is becoming increasingly popular it might not be the best choice for everyone and you certainly don’t have to use it to use R effectively. Rather than using an ‘all in one’ IDE many people choose to use R and a separate script editor to write and execute R code. If you’re not familiar with what a script editor is, you can think of it as a bit like a word processor but specifically designed for writing code. Happily, there are many script editors freely available so feel free to download and experiment until you find one you like. Some script editors are only available for certain operating systems and not all are specific to R. Suggestions for script editors are provided below. Which one you choose is up to you: one of the great things about R is that YOU get to choose how you want to use R.