tcltk GUIs (was need gui matrix editor: does R Core team have advice on how?)

On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 6:10 AM, Prof Brian Ripley
<ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

On 28/01/2012 22:04, John Fox wrote:

Dear Paul and Gabor,

The Rcmdr GUI uses the tcltk package, so I have some experience with
providing an R tcltk-based GUI for various platforms.

As Gabor says, everything works very smoothly on Windows because the R
Windows binary includes Tcl/Tk.

Maybe, but getting it there was very far from smooth.  Tcl/Tk compiled under
the compilers we used, but the resulting DLLs crashed R.  No one has ever
found the cause and I used the system SDK (essentiallly a version of VC++)
to build them.  And that puts us in a bind since the current system SDKs
generate code depending on DLLs that are not part of the minimal OS versions
we support (e.g. Windows XP and Server 2003, and the machine used to build
was retired 2 years ago).

Thanks, this is clearing things up. I believe these comments mean
that, at the current time, tcl/tk is as close as there is to an
officially endorsed graphical toolkit.  As I search more, I find many
other community contributors (besides Prof. Fox) using tcl/tk
(Sciviews).  So I should learn how to work with that.  Prof Ripley's
comment makes me think the endorsement is not entirely enthusiastic,
though.

If there were a change to emphasize Gtk2, I don't think I would be
disappointed. I've been testing table-making examples today.  On
Debian Linux, I am having more luck with the Gtk2 based packages.
dfedit in RGtk2Extras "just works" for me. Example:

library(RGtk2Extras)
mat <- matrix(rnorm(100), 10, 10)
dfedit(mat)

That edits the R object mat as expected.

On the other hand, I don't have success with the tk2edit from tcltk2,
even with the example in the help page:

library(tcltk2)

Loading required package: tcltk
Loading Tcl/Tk interface ... done

?tk2edit
 data(iris)
    tk2edit(iris)

Error in matrix("", nrow = nrow(tA), ncol = ncol(tA)) :
 non-numeric matrix extent

I've fiddled with this quite a bit, I believe there's some little
mismatch between this particular system's tcl/tk libraries and the
ones that tcltk2 is expecting. Packaging of tcl/tk has caused lots of
trouble with Swarm simulations that we run, maybe that's breaking
tktable usage too.   I'm going to look into that some more.

I think the idea behind gWidgetstcltk is great, it aims to create R
functions that can use either Gtk2 or tclk.  But the implementation is
a big hassle, it seems to me.  It inherits all of the management
troubles of both tcltk and Gtk2. For example.

library(gWidgetstcltk)
mat <- matrix(rnorm(100), 10 , 10)
gdf(mat)

Select a GUI toolkit

1: gWidgetsRGtk2
2: gWidgetstcltk

Selection: 2
guiWidget of type: NULL for toolkit: guiWidgetsToolkittcltk
Warning message:
In .gdf(toolkit, items = items, name = name, do.subset = do.subset,  :
 Container is not correct. No NULL containers possible

When I run the example at the end of the help from ?gdf in
gWidgetstcltk, I get this (even before trying to use the table at
all).

  obj[,] <- head(mtcars) ## replace df

Error in `.leftBracket<-`(`*tmp*`, toolkit, ..., value = list(mpg = c(21,  :
 Value has different number of rows than the replacement area

If I make the other selection, opting for Gtk2, I don't get an error,
but nothing happens--no table pops up either.

library(gWidgetstcltk)
mat <- matrix(100, 10, 10)
gdf(mat)

Select a GUI toolkit

1: gWidgetsRGtk2
2: gWidgetstcltk

Selection: 1
Loading required package: gWidgetsRGtk2
guiWidget of type: gGridRGtk for toolkit: guiWidgetsToolkitRGtk2

If I had not seen the Gtk2 table work well with RGtk2Extras, I'd have
no faith at all.

In conclusion, what am I supposed to work on?

If tcl/tk is likely to stay in the R for Windows package, then we can
work on streamlining the Macintosh and Windows instructions for tcltk
maintenance, then I see my mission now is to make TkTable based
widgets work.   Right?

Something Prof. Grothendieck said made me curious.  One can package
the TkTable library with an R package?  Why is it not already included
in packages like tcltk2 or gWidgetstcltk?

Debian package libtktable2.9 installs these files:

/usr/lib/Tktable2.9/libTktable2.9.so
/usr/lib/Tktable2.9/pkgIndex.tcl
/usr/lib/Tktable2.9/tkTable.tcl

So TkTable requries not just the tcl bit, but a shared library. Is
that a substantial roadblock to R packaging of TkTable? (I've never
tried it).

pj
-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas