Appendix A. Graphic user interfaces

You turned here first, didn’t you? By default, R provides a simple command-line interface (CLI). The user enters statements at a command-line prompt (> by default) and each command is executed one at a time. For many data analysts, the CLI is one of R’s most significant limitations.

There have been a number of attempts to create more graphical interfaces, ranging from code editors that interact with R (such as RStudio), to GUIs for specific functions or packages (such as BiplotGUI), to full-blown GUIs that allow the user to construct analyses through interactions with menus and dialog boxes (such as R Commander).

Several of the more useful code editors are listed in table A.1.

Table A.1. Integrated development environments and syntax editors

Name	URL
Eclipse with StatET plug-in	http://www.eclipse.org and http://www.walware.de/goto/statet
ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics)	http://ess.r-project.org/
Komodo Edit with SciViews-K plug-in	http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/ http://www.sciviews.org/SciViews-K/
JGR	http://www.rforge.net/JGR/
RStudio	http://www.rstudio.org
Tinn-R (Windows only)	http://www.sciviews.org/Tinn-R/
Notepad++ with NppToR (windows only)	http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/npptor/

The code editors in table A.1 allow the user to edit and execute R code and include syntax highlighting, statement completion, object exploration, project organization, and online help. A screenshot of RStudio is provided in figure A.1.

Figure A.1. RStudio IDE

Several promising full-blown GUIs for R are listed in table A.2. The GUIs available for R are less comprehensive and mature than those offered by SAS or IBM SPSS, but they’re developing rapidly.

Table A.2. Comprehensive GUIs for R

Name	URL
JGR/Deducer	http://ifellows.ucsd.edu/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.DeducerManual
R AnalyticFlow	http://www.ef-prime.com/products/ranalyticflow_en/
Rattle (for data mining)	http://rattle.togaware.com/
R Commander	http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/
Red R	http://www.red-r.org/
Rkward	http://rkward.sourceforge.net/

My favorite GUI for introductory statistics courses is R Commander (shown in figure A.2).

Figure A.2. R Commander GUI

Finally, there are a number of applications that allow the user to create a GUI wrapper for any given R function (including user-written functions). These include the R GUI Generator (RGG) (http://rgg.r-forge.r-project.org/), and the fgui and twiddler packages available from CRAN.

GUI projects in R are undergoing rapid change and expansion. For more information, visit the R GUI Projects page at http://www.sciviews.org/_rgui/.