I am really growing to love R. I’d dabbled with it briefly awhile back, but owing to a change of role at work I now have cause to use it a lot more (certainly beats Minitab).
RCmdr is a great way of easing yourself into R as it allows you to pick up the commands and syntax. Pretty soon though, since R is basically a programming language, you are (well, if you are me) going to want to use Vim and it turns out there is excellent plugin: Vim R Plugin that allows you to pass the current file or selection to R (much the same way as selecting and submitting in RCmdr).
When I installed it, it required Python 2.7 and the corresponding Pywin32, but I notice the latest release allows Python 3.1.
There’s one tiny problem that affected me when trying to send the selection or file to R. I got the following error (although the DOMAIN\username bit was my actual domain and username):
source("/tmp/r-plugin-DOMAIN\username/Rsource-5324-RCommander.R")
Error: '\u' is an unrecognized escape in character string starting "/tmp/r-plugin-DOMAIN\u"
Seems Vim R Plugin uses the results of whoami to create the VIMPLUGIN_TMPDIR, which houses the temporary files for sending commands to R, but for Windows users on a domain (i.e. corporate or institution users) whoami returns the domain name with the username and the backslash screws up the filepath.
I learnt that Vim Scripts are on Github - a nice consequence of figuring out a little fix.