Some R users become leery of graphical user interfaces. Pointing and clicking and dragging may be convenient, but it can be harder to save, check, or rerun an analysis.

But I think even most hardcore command-line junkies would agree that a drag-and-drop interface can be helpful for some exploratory data visualization.

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That’s what the new R package esquisse brings to ggplot2. It gives the best of both worlds: drag-and-drop, plus generating basic ggplot code for the graphs you create. And, it’s pretty cool! esquisse was created by two people at a French R consulting firm, DreamRs. The name esquisse is French for sketch.

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