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What good IDEs are there for R in Linux?

I've tried Rcmdr and Eclipse, but neither seems to have the same usability as Tinn-R in Windows. Are there any other options?

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closed as off-topic by joran, Luc M, Godeke, torazaburo, Andrew Barber Aug 18 '13 at 2:41



17 Answers 17

up vote 61 down vote accepted

A newcomer to the scene, which IMO looks very promising - and downright baller - relative to other existing IDEs like Rattle and JGR, is RStudio. It's free software, is cross-platform, looks very polished, and even has features like automatic refactoring.

Update 2012-04-12: I've been running it for a bit on our DB server, and I love that it's a web app that saves your sessions, resume-able from anywhere else. Plotting requires not only no X tunneling or png-writing but is easier to use than out-of-the-box R. Extremely easy to get up and running, and it comes with packages for Debian/Ubuntu (which I use).

The company/development is moving pretty fast, aiming to be the de facto standard IDE for all R users. If I'm gushing, it's probably because I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the IDE after a long time of using sub-par IDEs, not just for R but for plenty of other languages. So this was a bit out of the blue. I still need more time to really dig into it but I like what I'm seeing so far.

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Just found RStudio (prior to finding this thread), it's quite excellent. –  Jon L. Mar 23 '11 at 22:11

JGR isn't bad:

Most people I know rave about Emacs + ESS:

But it's not quite the same thing as Tinn-R.

Along different lines ...

If you're looking at a high level functions for data mining, then Rattle is an option:

and another high level app for interactive plotting:

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I have found that the Emacs-ESS combination is well worth the learning curve. I enjoy being able to:

  • have code and R console side by side
  • send the current line, paragraph, file, or function to the R console without touching the mouse
  • easily interact with R sessions on remote computers
  • enjoy all the editing abilities of Emacs

Here's the website for the project: http://ess.r-project.org/

Here's a helpful document about ESS in particular: http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/Refs/ess.pdf

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Brand new IDE out there (as of Feb 2011) is http://www.rstudio.org/. Seems very promising from what I've seen so far.

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This is a modern, easy-out-of-the-box solution. I've installed and administered RStudio server on an Ubuntu distro. It may not compete on all fronts with Eclipse + StatET, although tab completion on objects (variables, datasets & functions) is a major time saver as is the CTRL-R and other keyboard shortcuts. Vis pane has been a life-saver, as you can scroll through many images in the same session. –  c.gutierrez Aug 20 at 2:59

Although Eclipse was mentioned by the OP, I do not know if he ment it with the StatET plugin.

Eclipse with StatET is a really great IDE besides e.g. EmacsSpeaksStatistics (ESS), but as in other environments the user have to learn it's the basic usage first. The only handicap of this IDE could be the relatively high resources requirements as based on Java, but this makes the program OS independent of course.

Why I really would suggest to take the time to learn use StatET efficiently (cauction: very subjective list!):

  • be able to run your code really fast and easily with comfigurable shortcuts (by Ctrl+r by default),
  • thanks to the script editor and running environment is heavily integrated, debuging and reviewing your code cannot be easier,
  • configurabled environments by default (e.g.: R scripts),
  • you may define templates for frequent commands and those's environment (e.g.: loop, if conditions etc),
  • highly customizable syntax highlight,
  • TeXlipse integrated to view and edit tex code with ease (LaTeX support for Eclipse),
  • Roxygen support for literate programming (very handy at package development to automatically generate Rd files (manuals) from inline comments),
  • easily extendable with othet Eclipse plugins (e.g.: spell checking, (SQL) database management, image viewer, running external programs like Sweave).

A nice guide to read is A Guide to Eclipse and the R plug-in StatET by Longhow Lam.

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Nice, comprehensive answer! –  pufferfish Jan 15 '11 at 6:20

Gedit + RGedit plugin + Snippets plugin

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You've suggested eclipse; there is a plugin called StatEt which work quite well (even Sweave is supported!).

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+1 testing it now... –  David B Aug 3 '10 at 9:26
Eclipse is great because you can get, in your case, Java oriented distribution (or C++ and others) and StatET. –  Roman Luštrik Aug 3 '10 at 11:13
no auto complete for R library functions. also, I can't see the help from eclipse (stackoverflow.com/questions/3396485/…) –  David B Aug 3 '10 at 12:41
Use ESS =) Once you get your fingers used to the keybindings, you'll find it way too useful. I use Eclipse for JavaScript programming, while ESS remains unbeaten as R IDE ( + it's available for Windows). Though it hasn't got a steep learning curve, it's definitely worth investing your time & resources. And if you, perhaps, access R through SSH on a Linux webserver, you can fire-up ESS from terminal, while Eclipse, you just cannot! =) –  aL3xa Aug 5 '10 at 15:08
@aL3xa: +1 for correct use of steep/not-steep learning curve. –  BondedDust Jan 4 '12 at 23:44

If you are used to Eclipse, StatET (mentioned by mbq) is probably the right choice for you.

That being said I have a more exotic choice to offer that you might want to consider, if you like auto suggestion and pure syntax highlighting is not enough for you. At least for me auto completion of R-Code did not work with StatET.

Now I use Komodo Edit with Sciviews-K and R64. Sending Code from editor to R works really well and the editor offers auto-completion for R-Code which is really nice – in particular if you are new to R. I work on a Mac, but it should be easy to setup for Linux too.

I think it has lost some popularity because it wasn't to stable in the past, but at I feel it's much better now and it hardly crashes in my setup. So you might wanna give it a chance too.

EDIT: If you work on Mac Textmate with the corresponding R bundle might be interesting, too. Recently I am about to switch to Textmate. If you don't care about the $45 for textmate, it's probably the most stable choice I tested so far. But it's only available on a Mac. But hey I am really amazed by this editor (and as you can see I like testing setups ;).

EDIT: I realize this thread is still being read by someone, so I definitely need to mention RStudio. It came out of nowhere and quickly became the choice of a lot of people. And it's well deserved. It still has some bugs (like not being able to stop RSessions) but it has tremendous auto-complete with context help. But at least on my setup (Mac) it's more stable than StatET / Eclipse. Sweave and ROxygen is not really supported yet, but the developers are very active. Definitely worth trying.

EDIT II: Because it's fun to track this here's another edit. RStudio continues to win more and more users. The combination of RStudio, Roxygen2 and particularly knitr integration has likely been the largest contribution to this development. While Rstudio was rather used by applied users and in teaching and has improved to dramatically that there's isn't many situations in which another IDE / editor is a better choice. Being maried to ESS seems like to only valid reason left to not use it. Also the documentation of its ecosystem is just great. The latest: Package development by Hadley http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/description.html and his advanced programming http://adv-r.had.co.nz/

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+1 nice to know –  David B Aug 3 '10 at 12:57
Became the choice of a lot of people - including many emacs+ESS users like me (I use both; Rstudio mostly for packaged dev tools at this point) –  Abe Feb 8 '13 at 2:13
True. Amazing to realize that this edit was made in '11. R Studio has come a long since then. Just think of R Studio Server – and as you say all the devtools related stuff. kudos to the creators of an incredible product. –  Matt Bannert Feb 8 '13 at 9:38

I strongly recommend learning emacs+ess, but for a more modern-looking interface you can try RKward: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/rkward/index.php?title=Main_Page.

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There is a KDE 4 based IDE called RKward. It's nice because of:

  • Workspace Browser
  • Integrating the R console
  • data.frames editor
  • Syntax colored editor
  • GUI frontend for installing CRAN packages
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RGedit, great tool if you're keen on GNOME default text editor. Lacks autocompletion in script mode, though... but you can define snippets in a separate plugin (Snippets)... You can send code directly to R session running in the terminal window, tabbed multiple R sesions, there are several GUI templates for common data analysis (t-test, correlation), long story short, take a look at:


Few months ago (when I gave my blogging skills a try), I wrote a review for RGedit, here's a link (and a little bit of self-advertising): http://psy-stat.com/?p=12

Oh, and you can use Geany and set it up so you can send code chunks to R session... I've never done it, but I know it's manageable!

EDIT #2:
here's a helpful link: http://sgsong.blogspot.com/2010/08/integrating-r-with-geany.html

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I kind'a like RGedit, since it keeps things simple. But I have few issues with it: first, I can't get it to load automatically when I start gedit. I always have to check it under plugins. Second, I don't see where are all the nice features in your blog - all I have is the buttons and the console tab (which are nice, but where are all the other stuff). Third, I don't see how I can customize (or at least see) the keyboard shortcuts (especially for running code). Fourth and last, R help (e.g. ?hist) shows inside the console and not as html, although the html option is set. –  David B Aug 5 '10 at 11:58
+1 (forgot it earlier...) –  David B Aug 5 '10 at 12:46
OK, that sounds like a bug/installation issue, you should definitely contact the author. Btw, I'm running rgedit v0.7.0.3 and gedit v2.30.3 on Arch Linux and rgedit starts automatically. "The nice features" are located in R > Wizzards submenu. Keyboard shortcuts: R > Configure R interface > Edit keyboard shortuts . Do I have to mention that they work fine for me. Fourth and the last: it's a "bug", mail the author, htmlhelp is deprecated, use options(help_type = "html")... I've mailed Dan about that issue a long time ago, I thought he fixed that by now... –  aL3xa Aug 5 '10 at 15:02
Btw, you're talking about some basic stuff... in fact, so basic that it makes me wonder if we're at all discussing the same plugin! =) –  aL3xa Aug 5 '10 at 15:04
+1 Thank you aL3xa. We are talking about the same plugin. Now the only thing is still a mystery is how to make the plugin load automatically. –  David B Aug 6 '10 at 6:01

For my case, I would recommend RKward for linux, it is a KDE. I've been using RStudio in Windows, but when I switched to Ubuntu, I find RKward easy to use, and has a good interface.

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You can create a data frame without coding it with data.frame() function.

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This might be what you're looking for. It integrated Komodo and the SciViews package. I found it a bit too fiddley (I prefer vi) but if you're looking for a full blown IDE/editor for R in Linux it's pretty close to Tinn-R for Windows and it's written by the same guys!

Link: http://www.sciviews.org/SciViews-K/index.html

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I use Geany in combination with R. Geany provides a terminal in which one can start an R session and shortcuts an be defined in order to send highlighted text to the terminal.


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Emacs with ESS. Probably not as polished as Eclipse, but I do like it.

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Personnaly, I use gedit and my console. It works great :)

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any plugins added? –  David B Aug 3 '10 at 7:03
No, there's syntax highlight for R out of the box :) –  Guillaume Lebourgeois Aug 3 '10 at 7:32
Actually, there is a plugin: RGedit sourceforge.net/projects/rgedit –  aL3xa Aug 3 '10 at 10:14
In practice, I'm using Eclipse only for package development and some more complex works; gedit + console tandem also works quite good and is much lighter. RGedit looked nice, but still ends with SEGFAULT too frequent for me. –  mbq Aug 3 '10 at 11:53
