Features of the source editor

The most important panel in RStudio is the source editing panel. This is where you write your R scripts and probably spend most of your time working on the project. It has several features that make writing R scripts in RStudio much more comfortable than most other editors. The editor panel of RStudio supports editing several file formats such as HTML, Sweave, Markdown, C, C++, and JavaScript files. In this chapter we will discuss editing R scripts, leaving features for some of the other languages to Chapter 5, Generating reports.

Tip

Every code completion feature described in the previous section also works in the source editor.

If you're accustomed to the Vi or Vim editor you can let RStudio emulate some of their properties by going to Tools | Options | Code editing and selecting Enable Vim Editing mode.

A few words on code quality

A development process, either for a software project or when authoring a statistical analysis, is unavoidably comprised of writing...