Alternative Coding Tools

[djmangen]

Hello. I hope this is not an inappropriate question to ask.

I am moving from Windows to MacBook. On the PC I have for MANY years used the SPF/PC SPF/365 programming environment for code development. On the PC I continued to use this when switching from SAS to R/RStudio, never feeling perfectly comfortable with the script editor in RStudio. I'm sure that I can adapt, but...

So, with that as background: What programming tools OTHER THAN the RStudio script editor do people use here?

Thank you.

[DreamOfAlexander]

Hi,

Maybe Visual Studio Code can be another option.

You can read other people's opinion before switch to Visual studio code:
https://renkun.me/2022/03/06/why-i-switched-from-rstudio-to-vs-code/

[technocrat]

Visual Studio as mentioned by @DreamOfAlexander is more fully featured than RStudio as an IDE. To my taste, however, what I value in an editor is more room and fewer, rather than more, features. I alternate between three editors in macOS depending on cases that are too vague and idiosyncratic to be able to lay out.

1. lvim, a more streamlined Neovim for yank and place operations and simple regex
2. BBedit for intermediate regex
3. Sublime Text for regex where visibility into where search terms are found

Plugins for syntax high-lighting to varying degree are available for each and all support macros to one degree or another. BBEdit does not support LSP, but the others do, to support REPL. Another REPL tool is Juypter.

I use RStudio for rmarkdown/Quarto rendering, switching between projects on the fly and some of the addin facilities.

I haven't checked, but I'm sure that EMACs could be adapted as a principal R environment, although it lost out in my bakeoff with vi 40 years ago.

[AlexisW]

@technocrat

I haven't checked, but I'm sure that EMACs could be adapted as a principal R environment, although it lost out in my bakeoff with vi 40 years ago.

There's Emacs Speaks Statistics (I haven't personally used).

@djmangen

I have for MANY years used

I'm afraid in this case any new tool will take some adapting. Maybe if you can point to specific missing features there might be more specific recommendations.

Also taking this opportunity to link back this question which I feel never got the answers it deserved.

[technocrat]

I suspect that the answer to the linked question depends, as one commenter suggests, on specifics of the platform and its configuration. Since the problematic system was described as a “work computer” may well be a centrally administered Windows workstation identification of issue could be complete.

This was the situation with the last Wintel box I used (solely for shared file access). The thing took 20-30 minute from power on to displaying the first email.

[djmangen]

Thank you for some of the suggestions. I have been checking them out. FWIW is appears that BBEdit does now include LSP support.

[Juandev]

Well, I am writing Python code in Rstudio, but Ill be moving to Sublime Text to get more features. I guess it would work for R too. Sublime text runs on Win/MacOS.

[djmangen]

Thank you all for the suggestions. I have found your suggestions so helpful that I have swapped out my old editor (SPF 365 -- the mainframe origin of that tool suggests my advanced age) on the PC as well as use on the MacBook. Visual Studio Code is getting a lot of my attention.

Thanks to all for the graciousness of the response to the question, given that RStudio incorporates its own editor.