RKWard

RKWard is a transparent front-end to the R programming language, a scripting-language with a strong focus on statistics functions. RKWard tries to combine the power of the R language with the ease of use of commercial statistical packages.

RKWard
RKWard screenshot
Developer	RKWard community
Stable release	0.8.2[1]  / 1 October 2025; 2 months ago (1 October 2025)
Repository	invent.kde.org/education/rkward
Written in	C++, ECMAScript
Operating system	BSD, Linux, macOS, Unix, Windows
Type	Statistical software
License	GNU General Public License
Website	rkward.kde.org

RKWard is written in C++ and although it can run in numerous environments, it was designed for and integrates the KDE desktop environment with the Qt (software) libraries.

Features

RKWard's features include^[2]

• Spreadsheet-like data editor
• Syntax highlighting, code folding and code completion
• Data import (e.g. SPSS, Stata, CSV and Excel through package `rio`)
• Plot preview and browsable history
• R package management
• Workspace browser
• GUI dialogs for all kinds of statistics and plots

Interface

RKWard aims to be easy to use, both for people with deep knowledge of R, and for users who, although they have experience in statistics, are not familiar with the language. The application design offers the possibility of using the graphic tools as well as ignoring many of them and using the program as integrated development environment.

It includes a workspace viewer, which gives access to packages, functions, and variables loaded by R or imported from other sources. It also has a file viewer, and data set editing windows, display of the contents of the variables, help, command log, and HTML output.

Furthermore, it also offers components that help in code editing and direct order execution, such as the script window and the R console, where one can enter complete commands or programs as one would in the original R text interface. Likewise, it provides additional help such as syntax coloring documentation of functions while writing, and includes the feature of capturing graphs or emerging dialogs produced by offering additional options for handling, saving, and exporting them.

In recent versions, RKWard includes integration with RMarkdown such as highlighting, preview, and exporting. It has also included an integration with git for projects version control.

Package Management

The R package management is carried out through a configuration dialog that allows one to either automatically (because a plug-in requires it) or manually install new packages from the repository's official project, update existing ones, delete them, or upload/download them from the workspace.

Add-ons system

Thanks to its add-ons system RKWard constantly expands the number of functions that can be accessed without writing the code directly. These components allow, from a graphical user interface, instructions to be generated in R for the most common or complex statistical operations. In this way, even without having deep knowledge about the language, it is possible to perform advanced data analysis or elaborated graphs. The results of the computations are formatted and presented as HTML, making it possible, with a single click and drag, to export tables and graphs to, for example, office suites.

Add-ons available through The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN)

List of add-ons available on CRAN

Name	Version As of December 2, 2025[update]	Description
cocor	1.1-4	Statistical tests for the comparison between two correlations based on either independent or dependent groups. Dependent correlations can either be overlapping or nonoverlapping.
cocron	1.0-1	Statistical Comparisons of Two or more Alpha Coefficients. Statistical tests for the comparison between two or more alpha coefficients based on either dependent or independent groups of individuals.
klausuR	0.12-14	Multiple Choice Test Evaluation A set of functions designed to quickly generate results of a multiple choice test.
koRpus	0.13-8	Text Analysis with Emphasis on POS Tagging, Readability, and Lexical Diversity

List of add-ons available on RKWard Repository KDE application data

List of add-ons available on the RKWard Mirror

Name	Version As of December 2, 2025[update]	Description
rk.aiken.v	0.02.8	An RKWard plugin to calculate Aiken's coefficients for content validity (V) and homogeneity (H).
rk.ANOVA	0.01-23	RKWard GUI to conduct ANOVAs (using the ez package), pairwise t-Tests and plot interactions.
rk.ClusterAnalysis	0.01-15	RKWard GUI to conduct k-means, model based and hierarchical cluster analyses.
rk.CohenKappa	0.01-9	RKWard GUI to calculate Cohen's Kappa
rk.cSplit	0.01.9	An RKWard plugin to split concatenated columns into a long or wide format using the cSplit() function from the 'splitstackshape' package.
rk.downloadAppImage	0.01-0	Adds a dialog to install or update an AppImage of RKWard.
rk.dplyr	0.1.3	An RKWard plugin for data table combination and manipulation using the 'dplyr' library.
rk.FactorAnalysis	0.01-16	RKWard GUI to conduct principal component and factor analysis.
rk.forcats	0.1.7	An RKWard plugin package for factor manipulation using the 'forcats' library.
rk.ggsurvey	0.1.3	A plugin package analyze complex survey designs with custom plugins and the 'ggsurvey' package.
rk.gitInstall	0.2-1	RKWard GUI to install R packges directly from git or subversion repositories.
rk.gsub.sub	0.0.7	RKWard GUI for sub() and gsub() to find and replace patterns in character vectors.
rk.gtsummary	0.1.0	An RKWard plugin to generate summary tables using the 'gtsummary' package, supporting both standard data.frames (tbl_summary) and survey design objects (tbl_svysummary).
rk.MultidimensionalScaling	0.6.0	RKWard GUI for multidimensional scaling.
rk.pivot.reshape	0.01.8	An RKWard plugin to reshape data by pivoting it longer or wider using functions from the 'tidyr' package.
rk.stringr	0.1.0	An RKWard plugin for string manipulation using the 'stringr' library.
rk.survey.design	0.7.6	A plugin package to create and analyze complex survey designs using the 'survey' package.
rk.transpose.df	0.01.2	An RKWard plugin to transpose a data frame, turning rows into columns and columns into rows.
rkTeaching	1.4.0	A plugin with basic utilities for teaching statistics, and gives access to most common commands for data manipulation, probabilities, distributions, descriptive statistics (tables, measures and graphics), parametric tests, non-parametric tests, correlations and regressions.
rkwarddev	0.10-3	A Collection of Tools for RKWard Plugin Development.
XiMpLe	0.11-1	A Simple XML Tree Parser and Generator.

Other add-ons available on GitHub

List of add-ons available at AlfCano GitHub repository

Name	Version As of December 2, 2025[update]	Description
rk.cartographr	0.1.0	An RKWard plugin package for creating beautiful maps using the cartographr R package. This plugin provides a graphical user interface (GUI) to fetch data from OpenStreetMap and generate customizable map plots directly within RKWard.
rk.class.lists	0.0.1	This package provides a suite of RKWard plugins designed to simplify the manipulation of R object classes and data structures. It offers a graphical interface for coercing objects (e.g., converting a matrix to a data frame), changing vector types (e.g., numeric to factor), and performing complex list operations (creating, appending, and extracting elements).
rk.dates	0.0.1	This package provides a single, powerful RKWard plugin designed to convert various numeric and character representations of dates and times into R's standard POSIXct (date-time) format. It simplifies the often-tricky process of handling date/time data imported from other statistical software or sources.
rk.lubridate	0.0.3	An RKWard plugin package for working with dates and times data using the 'lubridate' library.
rk.names.labels	0.0.4	A plugin package to clean and create names and labels of variables of a data.frame or manipulate names in a list in the Rkward GUI.
rk.questionr	0.4.2	A plugin package to analyze complex survey designs with custom plugins and the 'questionr' package.
rk.svyplot	0.0.1	This package provides an RKWard GUI front-end for the base graphics plotting functions included in the powerful survey package. It allows users to create survey-weighted plots, which can be more representative than standard plots, without writing R code.

State of development

RKWard is under constant development, with periodic releases of new versions and add-ons contributed by its users. Currently, its developers already offer a stable version for Windows systems along with KDE.^[3]

See also

• Comparison of statistical packages
• R interfaces