Alternative IDE for Stata [closed]

Answer 1

Creating an IDE like Spyder or RStudio would require StataCorp to dedicate considerable resources. Since the current environment is "good enough" for the majority of the company's target audience, do not expect any considerable updates on this front anytime soon.

Visual Studio Code is now a great cross-platform development solution. As i have already stated recently in a similar post, this is a streamlined code editor, which is now mature enough and offers a very flexible environment for programming. Once installed, one can obtain the necessary add-on package for Stata syntax highlighting from the Visual Studio Marketplace. It is regularly updated and the user can expand its functionality using extensions. As such, if someone is programming in more than one language, s/he can keep everything under one roof. A nice extra is the built-in Git support, which is now pretty much the standard in version control. Using Stata Automation on a Windows computer, someone could potentially also link it to Stata to run the code in do files. However, i have yet to see this in practice yet (there has been an attempt to do this in Linux though).

I think this is the closest one can get to an IDE environment for Stata, at least for the time being.

Answer 2

There is no full-blown IDE for Stata. The question comes up pretty often at Stata User Group meetings, and StataCorp developers always say that they work in text editors. See http://fmwww.bc.edu/repec/bocode/t/textEditors.html -- there's plentiful customization for syntax highlighting in every major text editor, but that's as far as you would get, I am afraid.

HTH, StasK

P.S. Now that I thought about it a bit more, it is possible to send your code from a text editor into Stata. There are some hints to that in the document I linked to, and it floated up on Statalist a bunch of times. I just was not paying close enough attention, as I simply do myfile whenever I make major changes.

P.P.S. (Aug 2016) I use WinEdt, and it has a Stata mod that can send do-files to execute in Stata. Still, that's no IDE in the sense that you don't see objects, variables, macros, etc.

Answer 3

The Guide to Integrating Stata with text editors is a wealth of information here. Still just a text editor, but better than nothing.

http://huebler.blogspot.com/2008/04/stata.html

I've used UltraEdit and jEdit and SciTE with Stata. UE code highlighting was the most consistent, but it's non-free.