Moving to Mac for Python/R Programming

I am a long time Mac user since back in the days when Photoshop was my favorite software. That was before a noteworthy amount of converts outside the advertising sector turned to Apple. I used a PC before (and do so occasionally too), but that experience does not really qualify.

HTH, to helps to level my view a bit. Ubuntu is a really good idea. A Virtualbox is nice as Dirk suggests, though the latest KDE can be a little slow (at least on my MacbookPro with 4GB of RAM and sufficient RAM for the box). I do know if its any faster on a PC or with another GUI, but still I can recommend it.If you use it more often you're probably better of with Dual Boot.

For R I use Eclipse with the StatET plugin, which I cherish very much. Especially as a not-so experienced programmer I am able to learn from the source code of other R packages that are always listed in transparent manner in our objects window. For larger dataset I use RMySQL with a MySQL database.

For code repositories, I started out with Mercurial and never experienced any Mac related trouble. There is even an easy to install binary on their website. Plus I recommend this tutorial from Joel Spoelsky (not mac related).

For LaTeX, there is TexShop on a Mac, which an lightweight but stable editor. If you work with references and a lot of quoting I recommend to use BibDesk. It's a GUI to manage your bibtex entries. Just for the sake of pseudo-completeness, I mention WYSIWYG Latex Lyx for Mac.

I even use Texclipse, particularly if I work with R and Sweave.

You haven't asked for it, but i can't help myself, here's some free stuff that might interested you if you really choose to buy a mac:

• textwrangler (free editor, my standard texteditorm nice highlighting for many languages, starts quicker than Eclipse ;), also able to use plugins)
• Kod (another (free editor)
• subethaedit (another texteditor)
• Gmote (if you use an android mobile you can use it as a remote touchpad)
• SequelPro (nice MySQL GUI, heads and shoulders above of MySQL workbench)
• pdfsam (merge and split .pdfs)

That being said. Try Linux if you are into programming and even more so if you are into learning programming. From what you write, I feel you will get in touch with an environment that you like (tech and people wise). The more I think about it, I am still a mac user because of the Adobe products and because it's not a disadvantage for programming (at least for my (low) skill level).

EDIT: I also tried Komodo edit (as an R editor) for a while, which is also nice, but was a bit unstable sometimes.

EDIT2: Thx man, here is TextMate .

Emacs is what I would recommend. Admittedly there is a steep learning curve and strange hotkeys, but having not only a highly functional editor, but also shell, interpreter (R, python, and others), file manager, and version control within one environment that makes it easy to shuttle bits of text from one application to another without so much mousing around is unparalleled in my opinion. Of course, I'm biased -- other tools may work just as well, but I haven't needed to learn anything else in 20 years! If you go to a Mac look for Aquamacs. For R interaction you will use ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics).

PS: This text was edited with the "Edit with Emacs" extension for Chrome. :)

Try the $0 solution first: install Ubuntu (dual-boot mode) on your current computer, or an older computer just sitting around.

You can use all tools you are mentioning (Python/PyDEV, R, Git client for GitHub) with Eclipse for Mac OS X.

For LaTeX, you also have very good Mac OS X support. There are plenty editors you can use (TextWrangler, Emacs, several others) and there are compilers for LaTeX documents.