RStudio is a refreshingly intuitive IDE

I currently need to dabble with R for a smallish thing. I have previously dabbled with R only once, for an afternoon, and that was about a decade ago, so I had no prior experience to speak of regarding the language and its surrounding ecosystem.

Somebody recommended that I try out RStudio, a popular IDE for R. I was happy to see that an open-source community edition exists, in the form of a .deb package no less, so I installed it and gave it a try.

It's remarkable how intuitive this IDE is. My first guess at doing something has so far been correct every. single. time. I didn't have to open the help, or search the web, for any solutions, either -- they just seem to offer themselves up.

And it's not just my inputs; it's the output, too. The RStudio window has multiple tiles, and each tile has multiple tabs. I found this quite confusing and intimidating on first impression, but once I started doing some work, I was surprised to see that whenever I did something that produced output in one or more of the tabs, it was (again) always in an intuitive manner. There's a fine line between informing with relevant context and distracting with irrelevant context, but RStudio seems to have placed itself on the right side of it.

This, and many other features that pop up here and there, like the live-rendering of LaTeX equations, contributed to what has to be one of the most positive experiences with an IDE that I've had so far.