I asked both in Mastodon and Twitter “Anyone using other than #RStudio as their main #rstats IDE?” and—knowing that some programmers are literal and would probably reply ‘Yes’—I added “What is it?”

Of course I got a few replies like “I only have used RStudio” (Why reply?) or “I use RStudio but in docker containers” (Still RStudio). I also received mostly helpful answers, with some of the usual suspects and a more esoteric option:

  • The most popular alternative was Visual Studio Code using the R Extension for Visual Studio Code plugin together with the languageserver R package.
  • Neovim together with the Nvim-R plugin.
  • Emacs (or one of its variants) + ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics).

On the esoteric side Spacemacs (Emacs + layers of configuration), or an unholy combination of Emacs with Vim keybindings.

Any of these options will let you use Rmarkdown or Quarto if you are into that.

P.S. I focused on crossplatform options (I tend to move a lot), but a comment in Mastodon mentioned a Windows-only option that could be useful for a few people: Notepad++ together with the NppToR utility.