RStudio

Raised as a usability problem by 10 people on Hacker News over 10 years (2016–2025), in 12 threads.

People raised many different problems with RStudio, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 12 complaints

Unsaved files can't be saved when the R kernel dies, forcing copy-paste to another editor2025-11-28
Hangs, crashes and gets stuck on uninterruptible processes, needing force-kill daily2024-11-17
Hard to use RStudio with conda environments2022-11-04
The interface is very slow to respond because of the QtWebEngine approach2022-07-20
Markdown isn't rendered interactively while editing, and no immediate feedback like Python notebooks2022-01-13
RStudio crashes or locks up randomly and debugging is far worse than PyCharm2021-10-03
Installing packages gives unclear prompts and cryptic errors, and nothing says which R version RStudio ships with2020-05-30
Can only run one task at a time; cannot view a data frame while code runs2019-12-14
Rigid 2x2 pane layout hampers usability; can't use two monitors well2019-05-04
Vim keybindings only work in the editor, not console or other sessions2018-10-31
Pressing x at end of line doesn't move cursor left like Vim does2018-08-03
Editor feels too restrictive to the commenter2016-03-09