@RecDiffs@hotdogsladies@siracusa Many academics like myself are in no way computer scientists but have students (and colleagues haha) who really need to understand the basics of the command line, the shell, etc, in order to do the mechanics of their work in a non-magical-thinking way. And so we end up teaching courses like this: https://mptc.io
This stuff—understandably, but sadly—rarely gets taught to people, even though in the world of technical computing, Unix still rules all.
@cboettig@kjhealy It is difficult, but possible, to communicate the best of both worlds together.
E.g.,
[R] > system("ls")
is my friend.
For example, I show my students how to do calls from external tools within R. Of course, it is also possible.
And the misunderstanding about R scripts and RStudio can only be confirmed. People think #RStudio is #rstats. Which, of course, is not quite right. When I show the students #RKWard, they always ask if the R/Rmd scripts run there too. 🙃
The practical thing about #RKWard is that you can enter commands for each session that are always executed. For example, you can use this to load certain packages as standard. Here in the example I use the great library data.table, which is automatically loaded at each start of RKWard.
Does anyone know how to insert <- in #Rkward ? I'm trying to exclusively use it for a project, and inserting base pipe (|>) and assignment symbol <- are the first thing I need. I cannot find anything related in the shortcuts or snippets.
@krz
Thanks, I know Rstudio quite well as I've been using it for about a decade almost every single day and each day for about 8 to 12 hours (certified workaholic 😅). I also have been using Emacs ESS for about over a year and I have a stable config there too. At the moment I'm trying to expand my options and get more familiar with #Rkward
@krz#Rkward existed before #Rstudio (need to be fact checked), at least I worked with Rkward a year before Rstudio.
About VSCode, yes, I have used it. It is good for coding but awful for data analysis. Rkward and Rstudio both provide very detailed and granular setting on how to behave and interact with R. VSCode is more fit for Python as far as I have felt.
By using Nvim-R instead of RStudio for my R packages maintenance I have the feeling of gaining a deeper control of the process. I understand all the steps better. Even for building a documentation website with devtools, roxygen2 and pkgdown.
I won't drop RStudio though. It’s nice to be free to choose one tool or the other. #rstats#neovim
@beps I truly understand what you mean. I am now talking a little about #RKWard. We have a solid integration of #git, #rio and some other tools. #quarto works. A tight integration of #styler would be nice. We have a good R console and a terminal. Likewise, we don't have the deep integration of #devtools, #roxygen2 and #pkgdown. Some find it good (I) others find it a hindrance.
In the end, there are many good choices.
I started a small survey in the LinkedIn group "The R Project for Statistical Computing" about #RKWard. The results so far:
Turns out that 83 % don't know it and
circa 8 % use it.
There were 139 people who participated in the survey. Given that RKWard is among the oldest #rstats IDEs and GUIs [1], it is somewhat surprising. I suppose we should improve the advertising of our tool.
Open source projects thrive on others joining in. Here is a nice example of an #RKWard user who has started to create help for RKWard, in RKWard with #Quarto. Help is certainly gratefully accepted.
Occasionally, I think about how to work effectively with #rstats. Currently, I am teaching my #bioinformatics courses with #RKWard again. I try to do most of it with packages from the base installation. #datatable is an exception. But otherwise, I like to use #within (very fast) instead of #mutate.
But there are more approaches, which are often simpler/faster/stable:
I have received an unsolicited message (aka SPAM) for a statistical software package called SEM-PLS. Looks like a GUI for R to me. Some base plots, some #ggplot2, some statistics.
"You can purchase SEM-PLS 2023 with an 80 percent discount(Only 66 euros)"