issues with dev.new avoiding RStudio plot device on unix?

On 09/26/2015 03:22 AM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
On 26/09/2015 1:42 AM, Skye Bender-deMoll wrote:
Sorry, should have given more background.  x11 works fine on all my
systems when called by x11().  I'm the maintainer of a package that uses
the animation library, which has performance issues when used with the
RStudio plot device.  But if you call plot.new() when using RStudio, you
get an RStudio device, not the standard device for the platform because
it overrides the device option.  So I've had to have the library do
platform detection and platform-specific device calls, which R CMD check
doesn't like.  I believe that noRStudioGD argument was avoided to give
users a way around this, but it doesn't seem to be behaving correctly in
the unix interactive case.
It seems like the best workaround here could come from RStudio.  They
could provide a way for a user to indicate that they sometimes don't
want to use the RStudio graphics device (e.g. an option setting), and
your package could set and restore this option around your dev.new() call.
That would make sense, I've tried to propose they add it as a feature in 
the rstudioapi.  However, since the noRstudioGD option now exists in R, 
I'd think it should behave consistently across platforms?  Opening pdf 
on one and interactive on another seems odd.
The problem is that the device chosen by dev.new() depends on the GUI.
You can see the code that does this in grDevices:::.onLoad.  So in fact
with noRstudioGD=TRUE, the decision is identical to what it is in R:
you only get X11 if your GUI is X11 or Tk, you get pdf otherwise.
It's pretty common to use R on a machine where X11 won't work, so this
makes sense.

Now "RStudio" is common enough nowadays as a GUI so perhaps it should be
added to the list in both places, but I'm not sure that would work when
RStudio is running on a server rather than on the local machine.  I
think the RStudio people would have to make sure this worked, and if
they're doing that, wouldn't it be easier for them to provide the option
themselves?

Duncan Murdoch
The other seems to be for your package to temporarily set
R_DEFAULT_DEVICE if the user doesn't already have it set, and use
noRStudioGD=TRUE.  The disadvantage of this is that you need to do all
the platform-based decision making.
Great idea, I'll employ this workaround for now. Thanks!

best,
  -skye

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issues with dev.new avoiding RStudio plot device on unix?

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