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People are going to great lengths to get the gedit R plugin back by downgrading gedit. I tried, but couldn't make those instructions work. Mostly now I'm sad. RStudio is shiny and everything, but it is just so slow and annoyingly over-helpful. And nothing else seems to approach the elegance and "minimality" of RGedit.

Is RGedit going away forever? Are there any plans to bring it into the new gedit that ships with 16.04? What would I have to learn in order to bring it back? What sort of programming would needed, and how hard would it be? I'm not really fluent in anything but R...

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generic_user
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  • Did you have a look at my QA here. You will find there even a script which does the downgrade for you. – Videonauth May 16 '16 at 17:21
  • I usually use sublime-text when working with R code and RStudio - gedit is fine for quick edits but sublime-text is better for anything beyond that. And it's still light and fast. It installs via PPA (from webupd8) but I use it for ages and it works flawlessly. – jena May 16 '16 at 17:37
  • oh I just learned rgedit is not just gedit with R syntax - my bad :D from the screenshot on their homepage it looks a lot like geany (which knows R too) however I doubt it will have the same features.. – jena May 16 '16 at 18:01
  • although it seems geany might also work quite well: http://www.r-bloggers.com/using-geany-for-programming-in-r/ – jena May 16 '16 at 18:03
  • I'm just testing emacs with ess and it works like a charm, you might want to give it a spin too :) – jena Jul 27 '16 at 07:21

2 Answers2

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As you can see on the rgedit homepage it has not been maintained since 2013 and this is obviously the reason why it got dropped.

From my personal experience I can tell you a try to get it working with the latest gedit is more than pain in the a** and almost impossible without rewriting the whole plug-in.

As far your downgrade attempts, you should definitively should check out the guide I made for that. There you even find a script which does the downgrade for you.

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Videonauth
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  • Thanks, the directions that you link here worked for me much better than the directions that you wrote in the other thread that I linked. I fear that this is pretty temporary though, and I'll have to shift to a different editor eventually. – generic_user May 16 '16 at 18:52
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According to the info provided in the survey link in Mauricio's answer, you can use RGedit with Pluma editor, which is available from the repos:

sudo apt install pluma

Pluma is a fork of gedit2, maintained by Mate desktop project.

Alternatively, I personally felt in love with Sublime Text + sublimeREPL plugin combo, which works splendidly for me. Sublime Text is light and fast and at the same time very advanced editor (and my most favourite piece of software, because it's such a problem solver) and I highly recommend it to anyone who's looking for good editor. The R implementation is almost on par with Rstudio, however it's much lighter on resources. There are keyboard shortcuts for sending code from script to R session, you can make plots (making screenshots of just focused window saves plots without window decorations, at least in elementaryOS on my small netbook, where I use this setup), navigate console history on a minimap (including printed help). As a bonus (compared to gedit), Sublime Text has the best and most flexible implementation of multiple cursors I've seen so far (e.g. Rstudio has it, but rather cumbersome to use practically), which is a huge helper every day.

jena
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