An editor is a general-purpose tool for editing files and many other tasks. An IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, provides an interface and tools for managing projects in a specific language or framework. Both have advantages as environments within which to construct your software, and in reality you will probably use some mixture of the two.
There is an enormous variety of editors and IDEs available. Some popular IDEs include RStudio (for R), PyCharm (Python), Eclipse (Java), Cursive (Clojure), IntelliJ (JVM languages), VisualStudio (C++), and WebStorm (JavaScript). Jupyter provides a notebook interface for Python and several other languages, with some IDE tools.
Text editors are more general. Here are a few to choose from, plus some tips and resources for each.
RStudio #
Available from RStudio.com. RStudio Desktop is free and open source and works on Mac, Windows and Linux.
(Okay, so this is an IDE, not just a text editor, but it’s important enough.)
An integrated development environment for R, featuring integrated help features, an R console, a plot viewer, and support for R Markdown. RStudio is the most widely used editor for R code; if you plan to use R a lot, you may want to give RStudio a try.
Tips:
- RStudio has support for Git, meaning you can use menus and buttons to run Git commands from inside RStudio. View the documentation for more details.
- RStudio can show code diagnostics – like a grammar checker for your code, these diagnostics point out spacing problems, bad indentation, and other style issues. View the documentation to see how to turn them on.
Visual Studio Code #
Available from Microsoft. Free and open source, works on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
A fairly new, popular text editor for many programming languages. Supports extensions that add support for new languages (such as an R extension and a Python extension), and has built-in Git support.
To set Visual Studio Code to be default editor for Git, for editing commit messages, run this command:
If you use Visual Studio Code on Windows, we recommend the following settings:
{
"terminal.integrated.shell.windows": "C:\\Program Files\\Git\\bin\\bash.exe",
"r.rterm.windows": "C:\\Program Files\\R\\R-3.5.1\\bin\\x64\\R.exe"
}
Run the command R --version in Git Bash to get your R version (such as 3.5.1)
and ensure the r.rterm.windows setting above matches that version number.
Emacs #
Available from GNU for Windows, Linux, and macOS. A version built specially for macOS is available separately and preferred by some people. Can also be installed on macOS through homebrew. Free and open source.
Chris and Alex both use Emacs. It has a somewhat fanatical following, best explained by this quote from Neal Stephenson’s 1999 piece In the Beginning was the Command Line (also recommended reading):
I use Emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of Emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer – i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed – Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.
Emacs can be molded, through packages and custom code, to do just about anything. Emacs Speaks Statistics provides support for editing R and an interactive R console; Magit is probably the best Git interface ever integrated into a text editor; and there are packages for everything from editing Python to sending email to playing Tetris. Another killer feature is Org mode, the system we use to write lecture notes, and which is great for managing to-do lists, outlining ideas, and taking notes.
However, Emacs has been under development since the 1970s, and carries much of its history around. (The Emacs Git repository has history that stretches back over 30 years, before the invention of Git, and has more than 130,000 commits and 600 committers.) It predates standard keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl-S and has its own ideas about user interfaces. It takes a while to understand Emacs’s way of working and learn how to use it. You will be able to make it do anything you want, but you must be willing to put in some effort to learn how to do so. The effort will be repaid in the end.
Some resources:
- Mastering Emacs is a book describing effective use of Emacs; its reading guide describes the best way to start learning.
- Emacs Rocks! – a series of helpful emacs videos
- The Emacs manuals are extensive and detailed.
- Spacemacs is a fancy adaptation of Emacs to make it feel more modern and integrated.
- Doom Emacs, a powerful, batteries included config for Emacs; very popular.
- The Emacs Prelude, a bundle of pre-configured packages and shortcuts to start your Emacs with.
- better-defaults, a set of small tweaks and packages to make Emacs behave better out of the box.
We are, of course, happy to help you with any Emacs questions you have. But try not to get so caught up in customizing Emacs that you don’t get any actual work done.
Vim #
Available here, but likely already installed on your computer – it comes with Git Bash for Windows, is included on Mac OS X, and is included with most Linux distributions. Free and open source. It is notorious because most people can’t figure out how to even exit it.
Vim is minimal and simple, focusing on making motion through and manipulation of text fast and powerful. It supports extensions written in VimScript. By default it doesn’t have much fancy stuff, like an R console or diagnostics, but this can be added with plugins.
Vim users, accusing Emacs of being too large and complicated, accuse it of being “a great operating system, lacking only a decent text editor.” Vim claims to be the decent text editor needed.
Resources:
- Vim comes with a program called
vimtutor, which guides you through a tutorial. - The Vim Tips Wiki is, well, a wiki full of tips.
- Vim Adventures is a game which teaches you the basics of Vim.
Spacemacs #
Spacemacs is a pre-customized version of Emacs that integrates many of the best features of Emacs and Vim. It is easy to use, easier to learn, well designed. It remains fully customizable but offers a customization layer for typical users that makes it easier to add the functionality you want.
Atom #
Available from Atom.io; free and open source. Works on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Made by the same people who run GitHub.
Similar to Visual Studio Code in that it has plugins and integrated Git support (what else would you expect from the GitHub people?). Unfortunately the R plugin is not actively maintained, but many other languages have good plugins you can use.
Sublime Text #
Available here. Proprietary software, costs roughly $70 for a license. A popular and nice looking editor with many slick features.