RStudio has been a life-changer for the way I work, and for how I teach data analysis. I still have a couple of minor frustrations with it, but they are slowly disappearing as RStudio adds features.

I use dual monitors and I like to code on one monitor and have the console and plots on the other monitor. Otherwise I see too little context, and long lines get wrapped making the code harder to read. So I was very excited to see that RStudio has provided a great Christmas present this year, with source code panes able to be split off into separate windows.

You need the preview version as the feature hasn’t yet found its way into the release version. The features are explained in this help file, in which I also discovered the amazing shortcut Ctrl + . to jump to a function definition. I’ve no idea how long that has been in RStudio, but I’ll be using it a lot.

Now if they would only introduce the ability to select columns for cut/copy/paste …