S-Plus has a great object explorer and data editor built into its GUI. It allows you to easily see all the objects in the workspace at a glance, and sort them by name, size
I use Tinn-R which has a wonderful R explorer window which shows a list of objects. One can also chosose the view in which details of the objects are displayed. Tinn-r is a great script editor (which is its primary purpose) and has some shortcuts such as dataframe.name$[ctrl-shift-D] which brings up a list of column names in dataframe.name so that the programmer does not need to remember them and their exact spelling.