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Comment by klmr | Hacker News Reader

The article claims that

> R Notebooks can only be created and edited in RStudio

Luckily, this is wrong. Since R Notebooks are simply R Markdown, they can be edited with any editor (although the integration is obviously lost). This is, in fact, one of its decisive advantages over Jupyter Notebooks: most of the other issues mentioned in the article are solvable, whereas this issue fundamentally isn’t.

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OP here:

Fair counterpoint, although when I wrote that I was more referring to the HTML knitting (via knitr). Also, there's a few very-new VS Code plugins for R Markdown which look very very interesting. (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=neuron.n...)

After I used ESS with Emacs starting many years ago, I haven't opened RStudio. I know RStudio is very very nice, and ESS is a very complete option too.

But the nice interactivity of it is only in RStudio iirc, which is a major selling point.

Yep, the RStudio integration is very nice. However, there are other ways of authoring R Notebooks that also allow interactivity, and the only thing that’s missing then is having output inline inside the editable document. Apart from that, if you for example use Nvim-R or ESS, you can write R Markdown, execute chunks selectively, and get a visual, interactive representation of the results in real time that way. And once the document is done, a single press of a button will render the resulting Markdown/HTML/PDF document.

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