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04.02-The RStudio Environment

This document discusses the different panes in the RStudio environment and how to use them. It covers installing and loading packages, plotting functions, and keyboard shortcuts. The document provides an overview of customizing the RStudio environment and using different panes for code, help, plots, and the console.

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VICTOR ANDRE SALINAS HERRERA
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58 views13 pages

04.02-The RStudio Environment

This document discusses the different panes in the RStudio environment and how to use them. It covers installing and loading packages, plotting functions, and keyboard shortcuts. The document provides an overview of customizing the RStudio environment and using different panes for code, help, plots, and the console.

Uploaded by

VICTOR ANDRE SALINAS HERRERA
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The RStudio Environment

Susan Holmes (c)


Exploring the different Panes
We organize our environment by using the View tab in the
top of RStudio and have included a pane for the Console in
the bottom left hand, a pane for help/packages/plots in
the bottom right hand. The top right hand shows us our
Environment and History.

The top left hand pane is used for editing and saving
Source code, we haven’t used this very much yet, but it is
very useful for creating scripts, functions and code for easy
reproducibility.

As an example, let’s create a file by clicking on the File tab


at the top: you see many choices when you click on new,
you’ll see a whole list of different file types:
- R Script
- R Notebook
- R Markdown
… are the first three on the list, we’ll visit these in turn,
let’s start by opening a script called Record.R, this will serve
us to capture a record of some of our work.

You can tailor you panes in your environment once and for
all in the Preferences (access it by clicking on the RStudio
tab at the top on the Mac or use the Options dialog Tools
> Options menu in Windows),
then choose the Pane icon (forth one down).

More details on customization at RStudio


Taking material from your
history to the Code window.
If you click on the history tab on the top right pane of
RStudio, you can click on a few rows (click on the first row
then command click on the next). Once you see that the
rows

sqrs <- (2:17)^2


sqrs

have been chosen you can execute them by choosing the


<- To Console arrow or you can store them in your
Code window with the <- To Source

Try both now, first to execute those two lines, then to


stock them in your Source Code window.
The Help Pane
If you type ?letters The help about the vector of letters
available in R appears in the right hand lower pane, if you
have clicked on the Help tab.

Question Look at the help for other R objects.

Some functions whose help you can explore: ?log ?sqrt


?c ?q

Some data classes: ?vector ?Date

Note: On the top of the help page of the relevant topic a


word appears in curly brackets, in most of the cases shown
above you see {base}, this is because these objects and
functions come from the base package. In fact we will
download and use many supplementary R packages, for this
we need access to the internet again.

Click on the Packages tab in the lower right hand pane.


Installing and using packages
Under the three icons, Install, Update and Packrat: You see
a list with Name and Description, these are the packages
that have already been installed on your system, let’s add a
few.

Click on the Install icon, apopup window will ask you to


specify your preferred repository, for the time being we are
going to install from CRAN, so leave that choice, then type
in the package ggplot2 leave the path as it is.

Install to libraries set as it is (unless you don’t have


permission to write to that directory).

ATTN Make sure there is a tick mark in the


Install dependencies box. (many packages install
other packages they need and depend on to run at the same
time). Now the package ggplot2 should appear in the list
under the g’s.

A package can also be installed at the command line. If you


look at what was happening in the Console when you
installed ggplot2 you will notice install.packages(“ggplot2”)
appeared.

So for instance try typing


install.packages("dplyr")
Installed packages have been downloaded and recorded on
your hard drive, however, for every new session, you will
need to tell R to load that particular package, this is done
by typing: library(ggplot2)

You can also load it by clicking in the box next to the


relevant package so that a blue tickmark appears. To find
out more about the packages, click on their names the help
pane will come up for instance, click on the datasets
package.

Go down and click on the women data set, what does it


consist of?

women

## height weight
## 1 58 115
## 2 59 117
## 3 60 120
## 4 61 123
## 5 62 126
## 6 63 129
## 7 64 132
## 8 65 135
## 9 66 139
## 10 67 142
## 11 68 146
## 12 69 150
## 13 70 154
## 14 71 159
## 15 72 164
The most useful shortcuts
We have already seen some of these in action, here is a
more complete list:
- Up arrow in the Console window goes through your
command history.

Ctrl + up arrow (command + up arrow on a Mac) is


tailored history and auto-complete tool. Start typing
and hit that key combination, and it shows you a list
of every command in your historry that start with
those keys. Select the one you want and hit return.
This works only in the Console.

Tab is a useful auto-complete key. If you start typing


in the console or editor and hit the tab key, RStudio
suggests names of functions or files, you then select
the one you want and hit either tab or enter to
accept it.

When editing in the Source Code pane use Ctrl +


enter (command + enter on a Mac) to execute the
current line of code in the console. If you select
multiple lines of code in the editor and then hit
ctrl/cmd + enter, all of them will run.
Interrupt the current command with Esc, this can be
useful when you send the program into doing
something you regret.
Simple plotting
If you click on the Plots tab in the lower right hand pane,
you will see results from plots you ask for.

vectint <- 2:17


sqrs <- vectint^2
plot(vectint,sqrs)

You’ll notice that if you just use the Ctl-Enter way of asking
for the plot, the plot may appear in your Console screen,
this is true for recent versions of RStudio that have a
Notebook type interface like Python notebooks.

To have the plot appear in the Plots pane, use cut and paste
to the Console screen. Once you have made the plot you
can choose export to save the plot to a file.

Suppose that now we would like to plot the squares of all


the numbers between -17 and 17.

all17 <- -17:17


sqr17 <- all17^2
plot(all17,sqr17)
Q: Try different options in
plot:
plot(all17,sqr17,type='l')

plot(all17,sqr17,type='b')
plot(all17,sqr17,type='c')
Summary of this Session:
In this session we have learned more about using the
RStudio environment:
- There are four possible panes that can be customized
using the Options and Preferences.
- Cutting and pasting across different panes reduces the
amount of typing necessary.
- There are many different keyboard shortcuts available, up
arrow and ctrl uparrow, and tab are some really important
ones.
- The Pane on the lower right can help you install packages,
visualize plots or peruse help files.
Your Turn:
Go to https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-
us/sections/200107586-Using-RStudio and look in the
Keyboard Shortcuts, how do you move the cursor to the
Console with a keyboard shortcut (without using the
mouse)?

Customize the appearance of your code and console,


change the background.

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