R Studio

The Plots Pane

The Plots pane allows users to view, export, and publish non-interactive data visualizations. R uses the built-in graphics package by default, but a variety of packages exist such as lattice and ggplot2. While the output displayed is not interactive, it is responsive, i.e it will re-render its scales appropriately if you change the height or width of a plot. Notably, the “Zoom” option opens visualizations in a new window, while the “Export” option allows you to save the image with user-defined dimensions and in a variety of formats.

The Viewer Pane

The Viewer pane renders interactive graphics in HTML with the same options as the Plots pane. Brevity aside, it’s awesome.

The Plots and Viewer panes visualize non-interactive and interactive graphics, respectively.

The Help Pane

The Help pane is one of the most valuable panes for any R user. By calling function help() with a dataset, package, or bare function name (i.e. a function name without ()), its documentation, if available, appears here.

Note: Unless you’re using external data or custom functions, there’s almost always documentation. Whether it’s the unit of measurement for a variable in a dataset or the limits you can specify for a function argument, this little nook in RStudio is invaluable to new and advanced users, alike.

Pro Tip: Instead of the help() function, you can use the ? function before an object name, e.g. ?install.packages.

The invaluable Help pane displays documentation for packages, functions, and datasets.

The Environment Pane

Again, R is both a language and an environment. The Environment pane displays objects that are stored within your session’s workspace, or global environment, which must be recreated or reloaded with each new session. Note the following options:

• Environment: Opens a dropdown menu to select different environments, e.g. package environments
• Load Workspace: Opens a file explorer to load previously saved workspaces and their objects
• Import Datasets: Opens a dropdown menu to read in datasets that you can store in objects
• Clear Objects from Workspace: Removes all objects stored in the global environment

The environment pane displays any objects you’ve imported, loaded, or stored in your global environment.

The History Pane

The History pane documents every command you’ve executed in your session. When you select a line, you can paste it directly into the console pane with “To Console” or directly into the source pane with “To Source”.

The history pane records every command you’ve run in your session.

Layouts for Beginners: Taking Great Panes

Panes cannot be removed entirely from the RStudio interface, you but can shuffle them by order of importance. Click the “Tools” dropdown in themenu, “Global Options…”, and “Pane Layout”. We recommend focusing on those discussed in this chapter.

You can customize which panes appear, and where, in Global Options’ Pane Layout.

Less Important Panes, or Panes in the Rear

There are a couple of panes worth mentioning for new users. However, they are seldom used by advanced users:

• Files: Set working directories and create, copy, rename, and delete folders
• Packages: Install, load, update, unload, and uninstall added (“User Library”) and built-in (“System Library”) packages

Pro Tip: You probably won’t use these panes often. One of the benefits of scripted languages is that they can be reproduced by other users. As a rule, since much of your work will require loading packages, you should include the library() function with script-dependent packages at the start of every work. The same applies to working directories with the setwd() function.

Expanding to Fullscreen: Focus on the Pane

If you want to expand a pane, or “zoom”, to fullscreen mode, select “View” in the RStudio menu and “Panes”.

You can expand any pane to fullscreen mode in the “View” dropdown of the RStudio menu.

The File Submenu: Saving & Loading

The File submenu is the start of every scripted data product in RStudio. Just select “New File” and a litany of possible data products, about which we’ll learn more over time, are available to open. Remaining options relate to the saving and loading of scripts, projects, and datasets.

“File” handles all new, saving, and loading operations.

The Session Submenu: Sessions, Directories, & Restarting R

The Session submenu is a critical part of any R session. While you can always recreate a session by recreating objects, you can save computing time by loading saved session file. This submenu also allows you to set your working directory.

Note: There are times when you just have to restart R - maybe you started an infinite recursion loop or maybe you attempted to read in the data from a month’s worth of Harrier Jet landings to local memory - if so, the “Restart R” option is here for you.

Save and load sessions, restart R, or handle directories in the session submenu.

The Help Submenu: Cheat Sheets

The help menu has one main draw (for now): cheat sheets. Selecting a cheat sheet will automatically download a cheat sheet on an R-related topic of your choosing. Typically, cheat sheets summarize RStudio related packages and data products, but there is one for base R. For example, you can find the RStudio IDE cheat sheet here.

Grab cheat sheets on the fly from the Help submenu.

Code: Autoformatting & Behavior

The “Code” section affects the way R automatically formats your code and how you choose to write and run it. It has sensible defaults, many of which you may not be prepared to appreciate quite yet. For now, consider the following:

• Indentating: In the “Editing” tab, consider a “tab width” that works best for you. When indenting, would you prefer two characters (i.e. spaces), or four? The former allows more compact code. The latter allows for more intepretable code.
• Guide Margin: In the “Display” tab, consider applying a “margin column” of 80 or 100 characters (i.e. spaces). This creates a subtle guide in your scripts that helps keep code concise and readable. Even basic code within basic code can create, what RStudio’s Chief Scientist Hadley Wickham refers to as, “Dagwood sandwich” code.

Appearance: Express Yourself Intepretably

The Appearance section allow you to customize the size, font, and color of your text as well as the “theme” colors of your RStudio interface. Here, “theme” is both functional and aesthetic. For example, darker themes are more conducive to night owls. For all themes, certain syntax uses different colors to make your code more interpretable - keep this in mind for each theme!

Global options allow you to set preferences that can significantly impact your experience with RStudio.