The send to console functionality

The base R installation provides the console environment we mentioned in the previous section. This console is really all you need to work with R, but it will quickly become cumbersome to type everything directly into it and it may not be your best option. To efficiently work with R, you need to be able to experiment and iterate as fast as you can. Doing so will accelerate your learning curve and productivity.

Whichever tool you use, the key functionality you need is to be able to easily send code snippets into the console without having to type them yourself, or copying them from your editor and pasting them into the console. In RStudio, you can accomplish this by clicking on the Run or Source button in the top-right corner of the code editor panel. In Emacs, you may use the ess-eval-region command.