Why I switched from RStudio to Visual Studio Code
Where I am coming from
To preface; I am not a developer by trade. I write code as part of my job, mostly for analytics and sometimes some machine learning. I also code as a hobby. Granted, some of the concerns I have with RStudio, might be solvable within the current version — maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough. Some however, are not — and I wish that would change.
For much of my time, I have been using (and loving) RStudio. It has felt like the safe choice for a non-developer, stable and tailored to R. Over the years, support for Python has been added, but the general look and feel of the IDE has not. Despite pressure from friends, I’ve stuck with it.
A couple of months ago, this changed. In late spring, I started in a new job, and decided to give Visual Studio Code another go. Last time I tried to set it up for coding in R, it was not a great experience. New Mac, new opportunities I thought. This time around, it went better. It’s been a while since last I tried, and there has been improvements to the setup and experience (and probably some on my side). I’m using the R extension for VS Code, as well as radian (a terminal replacement that helps a lot). In addition VSCode-R-Debugger and the R packages httpgd and languageserver. The first extension has the steps necessary to get up and running.
