R Projects and Files in a Project

What is real?

As a beginning R user, it's OK to consider your environment (i.e., the objects listed in the environment pane) "real." However, in the long run, you'll be much better off if you consider your R scripts as "real."

You can recreate the environment with your R scripts (and your data files). It's much harder to recreate your R scripts from your environment! You'll either have to retype a lot of code from memory (making mistakes all the way), or you'll have to mine your R history carefully.

To foster this behavior, we highly recommend that you instruct RStudio not to preserve your workspace between sessions:

This will cause you some short-term pain because now when you restart RStudio, it will not remember the results of the code that you ran last time. But this short-term pain will save you long-term agony because it forces you to capture all important interactions in your code. There's nothing worse than discovering three months after the fact that you've only stored the results of an important calculation in your workspace, not the calculation itself in your code.

There is a great pair of keyboard shortcuts that will work together to make sure you've captured the important parts of your code in the editor:

1. Press Cmd/Ctrl +  Shift +  F10 to restart RStudio.
2. Press Cmd/Ctrl +  Shift +  S to rerun the current script. t.

I use this pattern hundreds of times a week.