Can I use R without R studio?

Question

We are confused on the difference between R and R studio. We do the majority of our work on R studio but we were required to download R as well. Is regular R necessary for R studio to work?

Answer 1

Indeed, R is the real technology you are using. RStudio is an IDE which makes it easier and nicer. Still, it's just working on top of R.

You should be comparing RStudio to a regular text editor. You can use R without RStudio, you might for instance use a text editor plus a terminal window.

Answer 2

As mentioned by @NewUser Rstudio is simply an IDE, and other alternatives do exist. Check the answer to another question here for a long list of alternatives.

Rstudio is however the most popular IDE, and it comes with quite a few benefits. Auto completion of code, the interactive window for html applications, interactive graphics window, easy connection to various databases with automatic connection string complection etc. However some prefer to use alternative IDE's and you could even set up notebook++ to write and execute your code through the terminal.

The most obvious alternative is likely the R IDE. The minimalistic IDE that comes with the installation has some benefits as well, while being restrictive in others. The most obvious benefit is the far lower usage of memory for each window. My thesis supervisor is a hard-lover of the standard IDE, while a friend of mine simply uses it in cases where he needs to View(...) very large data, and for some reasons can't live with a summary output.

That said this question basically has nothing to do with programming, and is technically considered "off-topic" on stackoverflow as it is asking for recommendations. Other websites in the SO family are simply better for these type of questions.