Text editor support for rmarkdown documents [closed]

Question

I was a bit surprised that this question hasn't been asked before. (If it has, apologies!) I am trying to find a good text editor with support for rmarkdown documents. Here are my criteria (in no particular order):

• syntax highlighting (for both R code and markdown syntax)
• ability to send code from document to console for evaluation
• free & open source
• autocompletion for bibtex entries
• cross-platform

I can't seem to find anything that fits the bill. Sublime Text can do all of this, but it's neither free nor open source...

I know a lot of people use RStudio, but its support for actually writing is not very good at all (e.g. bad spellcheck, no support for navigating a file, etc)...

Answer 1

The answer to any question involving editors is of course ... Emacs. In all seriousness:

• ESS for R
• Polymode (by one of the ESS authors) for mixed mode
• markdown mode by Jason Blevins (which is IIRC bundled with recent Emacs versions)

work well for me. I still go back to latex for 'real' papers with bibtex, but folks do this with markdown too so there will surely be a mode. And yes, it is cross-platform.

I use these on Ubuntu, and maintain the ESS package for Debian. So that one is always current. For polymode I just go to Github. It all works of course with MELPA and Emacs package archives.

Answer 2

Atom is free, extensible, and open source.

The only thing I can't get it to do is R code syntax inside a code chunk of an Rmd file (similar to Sublime).