Experience of RStudio User Trying to migrate

[david-priest]

I am a data scientist. I was recommended to try Visual Studio Code as a replacement for RStudio. I gave it a good shot but decided not to use it for the following reasons:

1. I am used to RStudio Code Colouring and was not able to reproduce it in Visual Studio.
2. Outline works only half the time and I couldn't find an option to just show a simplified version like in RStudio (only labels lines starting with # outside chunks.)
3. Plots/Outputs do not show up inline in the R notebook like in Rstudio. There's no way to quickly copy a plot by right clicking.
4. Variables did not show up. I could not double click variables (like a dataframe) to check its contents.

Overall, I think you should address these basic issues to make it easier to migrate from RStudio. It shouldn't be a matter of searching through this issue forum for 2hours+ to get these basic things to work.

[albertosantini]

Apart the first point, there are a lot of themes outside to choose, the rest of points here work.

2. You should give a look at R panel in the Activity Bar. It contains a Workspace panel with Attached Namespaces, Loaded Namespaces and Global Environment.
3. When I plot (or ggplot) something, a plot is displayed inside an editor: right clicking displays a menu with copy item.
4. See 2): hovering on the variable you may remove or view the object; if you view the object a panel is displayed with the content of the variable; if the variable is a data frame, you see a sort of spreadsheet.

Hope that helps; just in case you may provide more information or steps to reproduce the issue.

[benz0li]

I was recommended to try Visual Studio Code as a replacement for RStudio.

The beauty of VS Code is that it has extensions for R, Python and Julia – today's major Data Science languages.

@purisuto VS Code not only replaces RStudio but also PyCharm and Juno; the latter has been officially replaced by the VS Code Julia extension.

---

Check out my reference deployment at https://demo.jupyter.b-data.ch or have a look at

• JupyterLab R docker stack
• JupyterLab Python docker stack
• JupyterLab Julia docker stack

ℹ️ Each docker stack has also GPU accelerated images available.

---

What makes these images different:

1. Multi-arch: linux/amd64, linux/arm64/v8
   ℹ️ Runs on Apple M series using Docker Desktop.
2. Base image: Debian instead of Ubuntu
   ℹ️ CUDA-enabled images are Ubuntu-based.
3. IDE: code-server next to JupyterLab
   ℹ️ code-server = VS Code in the browser.
4. Just Python – no Conda / Mamba

[LR1933]

I was recommended to try Visual Studio Code as a replacement for RStudio.

The beauty of VS Code is that it has extensions for R, Python and Julia – today's major Data Science languages.

@purisuto VS Code not only replaces RStudio but also PyCharm and Juno; the latter has been officially replaced by the VS Code Julia extension.

Check out my reference deployment at https://demo.jupyter.b-data.ch or have a look at

• JupyterLab R docker stack
• JupyterLab Python docker stack
• JupyterLab Julia docker stack

ℹ️ Each docker stack has also GPU accelerated images available.

What makes these images different:

1. Multi-arch: , linux/amd64``linux/arm64/v8
   ℹ️ Run natively on Apple M1/M2 (Docker Desktop).
2. Base image: Debian instead of Ubuntu
   ℹ️ CUDA-enabled images are Ubuntu-based.
3. IDE: code-server next to JupyterLab
   ℹ️ code-server = VS Code in the browser.
4. Just Python – no Conda / Mamba

VS Code is great, but the biggest problem for me is that there is no color distinction for the input and output of R code in the terminal. Additionally, the error and warning messages are also written similarly to other code. So I have to face a large white undifferentiated code in terminal when using VS Code. Rstudio does great about this. Do you have any advise to solve this problems?

[eitsupi]

@lijiaqi-github Have you tried radian? https://github.com/randy3k/radian

[LR1933]

@lijiaqi-github Have you tried radian? https://github.com/randy3k/radian

Sure, but there is a new problem, #1390.

I'm sorry to say this, but I think Radian is a bit slow to respond, and there are some errors that I have never encountered in RStudio.

[benz0li]

Sure, but there is a new problem, #1390.

@lijiaqi-github Can you reproduce this on my reference deployment at https://demo.jupyter.b-data.ch?

• OS: Debian 12
• Code Version: 1.79.2
• Radian Version: 0.6.6
  • r executable: /usr/local/lib/R/bin/R
  • r version: 4.3.1
  • python executable: /usr/local/bin/python
  • python version: 3.11.4

ℹ️ This seems to be a Windows specific issue.

[LR1933]

@benz0
li I'm not very familiar with programming software, so I'm hoping that's my problem. It was me who made a mistake, but I can't figure out the reason.

Would it be better to switch from Windows to Mac?

Here is my configuration and VScode setting.json. I tried to open Radian by VS Code in your Jupyter link, but I'm not familiar with Jupyter and couldn't succeed. I haven't used Jupyter before, so I don't know how to do it.
#########################################################################
OS: Windows 11 Pro for Workstations version-22H2 22621.1928
Code Version: 1.80.0 (VS code)
Radian Version: 0.6.6 (I don't know how to check the version. I installed radian last week so it should be 0.6.6)
r executable: C:\Program Files\R\R-4.3.1\bin\R.exe
r version: 4.3.1
python executable: C:\Users[myname]\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python311\python.exe
python version: 3.11.4
VS code setting.json
{
"r.bracketedPaste": true,
"r.rterm.windows": "C:\Users\[myname]\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python311\Scripts\radian.exe",
}
#########################################################################

[github-actions]

This issue is stale because it has been open for 365 days with no activity.

[ThomasSoeiro]

@eitsupi @Fred-Wu perhaps this "issue" can be closed (no actual issues reported) or moved to https://github.com/REditorSupport/vscode-R/discussions (idk if it is possible)