Options for working with R

Note

For Fall 2025, the primary R platform for Calvin courses will be _______. You are welcome to also use other options, including installng locally, but the primary support will be for _____.

R is “a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics.”

There are several options for how you choose to work with R. The two main decisions you need to make are

  1. Whether to work locally (on your own laptop or deskstop) or remotely (using a cloud service).

    Working remotely has the following advantages:

    • You can access your session from any device with a brower.
    • If you are taking a course and your instructor has set things up on a server, all the necessary packages and additional software configuration may have been done for you already and you will be sure to have things set up the way your instructor intends.

    Examples of web-based R systems include https://posit.cloud/ and (for Calvin faculty, staff, and students) https://coder.cs.calvin.edu.

    Working locally requires you to install

    • R (from CRAN),
    • an editor (RStudio, VS Code, or Positron) and
    • likely a number of R packages.

    All of this is free and installation is fairly simple. For more information see Installing an R environment on your own device.

  2. Whether you want to work in RStudio, VS Code, or Positron.

    Each of these provides an environment for editing and running R Code and for creating documents.

    1. RStudio has been the go-to environment for work in R for quite some time. It is freely available from Posit.

    2. Visual Studio Code is a general purpose code editor. There are many extensions that provide additional features to VS Code, including many that make working with R much nicer. The main reason you might work in VS Code is that it may be familiar to you from computer science courses or other coding projects.

    3. Positron is a fork of VS Code available from Posit. It is targeted at data science use cases and adds some of the R/Python goodies from RStudio to VS Code. Free cloud options are not available as of July 2025, but it is possible to use ssh to access files on a remote server using desktop Positron.

Both RStudio and VS Code are available in a web browser via https://coder.cs.calvin.edu.