Synth Package Installs in Console but not Rstudio

General
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#1

Hi, I'm totally new to R and specifically looking to be able to run a particularly stats package. On the R Console, I'm able to type install.packages("Synth") and it downloads perfectly fine using a mirror from IA State (USA): https://mirror.las.iastate.edu/CRAN/bin/macosx/contrib/4.1/

However, when I use Rstudio and type in the same command, i get a flood of error messages and the package doesn't install. In fact, it appears the files were downloaded, but then there are errors when unpacking the files. For example: "/Users/mynamehere/opt/anaconda3/bin/../include/c++/v1/wchar.h:133:77: error: use of undeclared identifier 'wcschr'
wchar_t* __libcpp_wcschr(const wchar_t* __s, wchar_t __c) {return (wchar_t*)wcschr(__s, __c);}"

I'm using Rstudio Desktop v 1.1.456

Is there some problem due to having anaconda already installed? I can't seem to get Rstudio to extract packages to any other folder, even when typing install.packages("Synth",lib='~/Library/R/3.6/library') or any other directory. I don't need anaconda and happy to use Rstudio outside of it but it seems to have taken over

#2

Most likely you are using the version that comes with the Anaconda distribution which is set to work with the Anaconda's R core and it makes installing packages from CRAN a nightmare. If you are going to keep this path I recommend you to install R packages using the Anaconda Navigator, however, RStudio is not officially supported through Anaconda so I would strongly recommend using a stand alone installation instead.

#4

I actually tried downloading Rstudio separately, but whenever I open it, it seems to have anaconda automatically set as the default library. Do I need to uninstall anaconda to get a standalone Rstudio or somehow reset the settings for when I open the standalone version? Thank you!

#5

Maybe it's being set on a startup file. You can change the default library folder by setting your R_LIBS_SITE environmental variable on a .Reviron or .Rprofile file.

For a more detailed explanation, you can read this blog post