To change the theme, just go to RStudio –> Preferences (on a Mac) or Tools –> Options (on a Windows) and then click the Appearance tab where you can modify the Editor theme.

Here I’ve set the editor color theme in RStudio to Solarized Dark, which is easier on the eyes when spending a lot of time coding in R.

In comparison to RStudio, the basic R IDE/console is extremely basic and doesn’t provide as many accessible tools as RStudio does. Most people who use R also use RStudio because it provides a clean point-and-click dashboard of tools where you can type your code, view your figures, organize your data, variables, and files, as well as viewing the help window. That’s what the plain R console looks like I just loaded up some data, viewed the first few rows, and renamed the columns.īy comparison, RStudio is a more versatile IDE, or Integrated Development Environment. You could code in R without using RStudio, as you can see in the image below. So R is the programming language itself, and it comes with an environment or console that can read and execute your code. Its versatility is highlighted by the large number of user-created packages that it comes with, which provide useful functions and guides that anyone can use (e.g., found on CRAN).

If you want to follow along with a video tutorial, you can click on the image below where you can watch the first lesson in my full course on the Basics of R (for ecologists).įor starters, R is a free open-source programming language used for organizing, analyzing, and visualizing data. In this post I’ll show you how to do that and how to download and install RStudio-a key tool for using R, and how I do all my work and tutorials. One of the first steps to learning R is to have it downloaded and installed on your computer.

Installing rstudio