RStudio was once my favorite and most often-used IDE. And there are still a lot of reasons to use it, even if you’ve gotten used to something like Spyder or Jupyter. RStudio is a clean IDE that allows you to simultaneously view your filesystem, environment variables, R scripts, and console, and is all very specifically tailored to R, which is important in many cases (R is an amazing but finicky language).
I recently found myself setting up a new computer, spinning up ~23864283.34 new projects in R, and wanting to stay somewhat organized in the process. After doing some digging, I decided to give Anaconda environments a try to have the ability to run different versions of R and do this across R on the command line, RStudio, and jupyter notebooks (IRKernel). I have decided to share my process.
Installing Anaconda First, let’s make sure Anaconda is installed.