RStudio Blog

The final version of RStudio v0.95 is now available for download from our website (thanks to everyone who put the preview release through its paces over the last couple of weeks!). Highlights of the new release include:

• Projects — A new system for managing R projects that enables easy switching between working directories and per-project contexts for source documents, workspaces, and history.
• Code Navigation — Typeahead navigation by file or function name (Ctrl+.) and the ability to navigate directly to the definition of any function (F2 or Ctrl+Click).
• Version Control — Integrated support for Git and Subversion, including changelist management, diffing/staging, and project history.

Quite a bit has been added to RStudio since the initial v0.92 release a year ago. We’ve put together a new screencast that includes a quick tour of the product and also highlights some of the new features in v0.95:

There is also an interview with RStudio founder JJ Allaire over on DecisionStats that has a more in-depth discussion of the release and the RStudio project in general.

The evolution of RStudio is a direct result of the many in-depth conversations we’ve had with users at meetups, conferences, and on our support forum. We realize that there’s plenty more to do and hope we can keep up with all of the great feedback! In that spirit we hope to see lots of folks this Thursday night at the Chicago RUG meetup as well as in February in Houston and Los Angeles.

The next version of RStudio (v0.95) is now available as a preview release. Highlights include:

• Projects — A new system for managing R projects that enables easy switching between working directories, running multiple instances of RStudio with different projects, and per-project contexts for source documents, workspaces, and history.
• Code Navigation — Typeahead navigation by file or function name (Ctrl+.) and the ability to navigate directly to the definition of any function (F2 or Ctrl+Click).
• Version Control — Integrated support for Git and Subversion, including changelist management, diffing/staging, and project history.

Detailed documentation on the new features will be available along with the final release of v0.95, which we expect to make available by the end of January.

We’re also planning on being at the Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles R User Groups over the next few weeks. We’ll be talking about the new release as well as the general state of the project and where people would like to see us go in the future. Meeting dates are:

• Chicago (Thursday, January 26th)
• Houston (Tuesday, February 7th)
• Los Angeles (Thursday, February 9th)

Thanks in advance to everyone who tries out the preview release (you can download it here). Let us know what works, what doesn’t, and what else you’d like to see us do.

With R 2.14 slated to be released next week we wanted to encourage everyone planning to upgrade to also update to the latest release of RStudio (v0.94.110). For R 2.14 users this release includes tweaks related to compatibility with the R 2.14 graphics engine as well as compatibility with the new parallel package. There are also a number of other bug fixes which make this a worthwhile update even for users not running R 2.14 (see the release notes for details).

In the meantime we’ve also been busy at work on the next release of RStudio (v0.95). This release will include some major new features including a project system, code navigation, as well as an integrated version control UI (for subversion and git). We’ll be announcing a preview of this release on our blog within the next few weeks.

Finally, we also wanted to mention that O’Reilly has published a book by John Verzani on using RStudio. The book has lots of good insights on learning and getting the most out of RStudio, and also covers some more advanced topics like authoring packages. More info on the book is available here.

RStudio Beta 3 (v0.94) is available for download today. The goal for this release was to refine and improve our core features based on the feedback we’ve gotten on our first two betas. Highlights of the new release include:

• Source editor enhancements — New editor features include brace/paren/quote matching, more intelligent cursor placement after newlines, function navigation, regex find and replace, run to/from the current line, and a command to re-run the last code region. There’s naturally still lots more we’d like to do in the editor and we plan to keep improving it with each beta release.
• New plot export features — We now have a much more flexible plot export UI that supports several formats including PDF, JPEG, TIFF, SVG, BMP, Metafile, and Postscript. The new UI also includes resizable image preview with the ability to maintain the current aspect ratio.
• Package installation and management— We’ve added many more options to the install packages dialog including support for local archives and multiple target libraries. There is also a new check for package updates dialog as well as the ability to filter the packages listing by name and/or description.
• Dozens of other small improvements — We’ve also made many smaller enhancements including context-aware F1 for help, sorting of file listings, resizable plot zoom window, custom PDF export sizes, removing items from history, additional working directory commands, optional syntax highlighting for console input, and .zip and .tar.gz packages for users installing without admin privilleges.

Full details on the various new features, enhancements, and bug fixes in v0.94 are in the release notes.

Thanks again to everyone for the thorough and thoughtful feedback on our previous betas, please keep it coming!

RStudio Beta 2 (v0.93) is available for download today. We’ve gotten incredibly helpful input from the R community and this release reflects a lot of that feedback.

The release notes have the full details on what’s new. Some of the highlights include:

Source Editor Enhancements

• Highlight all instances of selected text
• Insert spaces for tabs (soft-tabs)
• Customizable print margin line
• Selected line highlight
• Toggle line numbers on/off
• Optional soft-wrapping for R source files

Customizable Layout and Appearance

• The layout of panes and tabs is now configurable (enabling side-by-side source and console view, among others).
• Support for a variety of editing themes, including TextMate, Eclipse, and others.

Interactive Plotting

This release features manipulate, a new interactive plotting feature that enables you to create plots with inputs bound to custom controls (e.g. slider, picker, etc.) rather than hard-coded to a single value. For example:

manipulate(
  # plot expression
  plot(cars, xlim = c(0, x.max), type = type, ann = label),
  # controls
  x.max = slider(10, 25, step = 5, initial = 25),
  type = picker("Points" = "p", "Line" = "l", "Step" = "s"),
  label = checkbox(TRUE, "Draw Labels")
)

More

• RStudio now works with versions of R installed from source (either via make install or packaged by MacPorts, Homebrew, etc.).
• Enhanced support for Unicode and non-ASCII character encodings.
• Improved working directory management including new options for default behavior, support for shell “open with” context menus, and optional file assocations for common R file types (.RData, .R, .Rnw).
• Many other small enhancements and bug fixes (see the release notes for full details).

We hope you try out the new release and keep talking to us on our support forum about what works, what doesn’t, and what else you’d like RStudio to do.

RStudio is a new open-source IDE for R which we’re excited to announce the availability of today. RStudio has interesting features for both new and experienced R developers including code completion, execute from source, searchable history, and support for authoring Sweave documents.

RStudio runs on all major desktop platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, or Fedora) and can also run as a server which enables multiple users to access the IDE using a web browser.

A couple of screenshots (click here for more screenshots):

The version of RStudio available today is a beta (v0.92) and is released under the GNU AGPL license. We’re hoping for lots of input and dialog with the R community to help make the product as good as it can be!

More details on the project as well as download links can be found at: http://www.rstudio.org.