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Code editors and IDEs for R

This page lists common editors and IDEs used for R development and brief notes on why you might pick each.

RStudio / Posit

  • Full-featured IDE tailored for R (Desktop and Server).
  • Built-in console, environment pane, plots, package manager, debugger, and tight RMarkdown support.
  • Good default for data analysis, teaching and reproducible workflows.
  • Install RStudio from posit.

Visual Studio Code

  • Lightweight, extensible editor suitable for multi-language projects.
  • Use R extensions (search "R" in the Extensions view) and enable the R Language Server by installing the R package languageserver: 
    install.packages("languageserver")
  • Integrates with notebooks, git, and other tools; useful when working with Python+R or larger codebases.
  • Install VS code from the Visual Studio Code site.

RKWard and StatET (Eclipse)

  • GUI frontends (RKWard) or Eclipse-based (StatET) for users preferring integrated graphical tools other than RStudio.

Choose the tool that fits your workflow - we recommend that you use: RStudio for most R-centric work and VS Code for mixed-language or lightweight projects.