R text editors for introductory statistics courses [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicates:
Best IDE / TextEditor for R
Recommendations for Windows text editor for R

Dear All,

I teach a large introductory R course (about 100 students), and would like to recommend suitable text editors for R. The students who attend this course are first year mathematics undergraduates doing their very first course in R. They have never programmed in any language before.

For the vast majority of them, it wouldn't beneficial for them to learn to use a 'complex editor' - by this I mean emacs and vi.

What I would like to do is recommend simple text editors that are

• free
• can be easily installed on their laptops by users with little computer knowledge
• have R syntax highlighting.
• available for Windows or Mac.

For windows I've found:

• TINN-R
• Notepad ++ with the R plugin

Are there any others that I've missed for Windows?

There are a few threads that deal with R text editors:

• Best IDE / TextEditor for R
• Recommendations for Windows text editor for R
• Which IDE for R in Linux?

but these are a bit too complicated for my purpose.

Edits

Following comments from Shane and others I've reworded the question.

Answer 1

Given that you don't have an major specific requirements (like an object browser), it's probably best to use what you're already using as much as possible. Something like Textpad is very simple and can do syntax highlighting.

Here are a few more pointers:

• First of all, the R console that ships with Windows has it's own script editor. Just go File > New Script. It's very easy to use and you can execute code by highlighting it. If you just want something simple, I would stick with that.
• I use Eclipse (with StatET) on Windows, and I have used it on a Mac too. It's great if you want an extensive IDE (syntax highlighting, integrated console, SVN, etc.) with a small learning curve.
• JGR is also very good and platform independent.
• Sciviews (which has Tinn-R) has several other options, including SciViews-K which is an R extension for Komodo.
• Two others worth mentioning are Rattle and Rkward.
• Emacs and VIM have a bigger learning curve, but they're also very powerful, especially if you're already using them for something else.