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

7 messages · Ott Toomet, Stefan Evert, Skye Bender-deMoll +1 more

#
Hi R-devl,

I'm still unable to force opening an *interactive* non-Rstudio 
platform-specific plot device on *unix* systems.

dev.new() add a new argument 'noRStudioGD' in R 3.1.1.  Thank you. It 
works for me when using RStudio on Windows, but on the unix system it 
opens a pdf device instead of an interactive device when using an 
interactive RStudio session (with R_DEFAULT_DEVICE and 
R_INTERACIVE_DEVICE not set).

Do other unix RStudio users see this behavior?

It appears that the relevant line of dev.new (and in zzz.R):

    else if (nzchar(dsp) && .Platform$GUI %in% c("X11", "Tk"))
              X11
    else defdev


but when I step through in debugger, I see that

Browse[2]> .Platform$GUI
[1] "RStudio"

so instead of returning X11, it returnd defdev (pdf)

perhaps changing to

.Platform$GUI %in% c("X11", "Tk", "RStudio")

would work, but seems a little strange logically.


best,
  -skye

p.s.  I wonder if instead of having a noRStudioGD=TRUE flag, it might be 
a more future-proof design to have an avoid.devices='RStudioGD' argument 
  in case users need to induce similar behavior to avoid other current 
or future devices?  Probably to late now tho.
#
Can you describe your problem a bit more?

* What kind of unix system do you have?
* Can you run other X11 programs?

I had a similar issue, and the problem was that the computer was not set up
to support X11.  As a minimum, you have to install /xauth/, and potentially
also other libraries if you want to install packages from source.

Best,
Ott

On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 11:53 AM, Skye Bender-deMoll <skyebend at skyeome.net>
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.
On 09/25/2015 08:31 PM, Ott Toomet wrote:
#
Same problem here on Mac OS X 10.10.5 with R 3.2.2 and RStudio 0.99.473.

I think dev.new() tries to find a suitable device in an interactive session with this code

	dsp <- Sys.getenv("DISPLAY")
	if (.Platform$OS.type == "windows")
		windows
	else if (.Platform$GUI == "AQUA" || ((!nzchar(dsp) || grepl("^/tmp/launch-", dsp)) && .Call(C_makeQuartzDefault)))
		quartz
	else if (nzchar(dsp) && .Platform$GUI %in% c("X11", "Tk"))
		X11
	else defdev 

which fails for me because RStudio sets .Platform$GUI to "RStudio" (thanks, RStudio!) and my DISPLAY variable looks like this

	/private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.2wKas4wzPe/org.macosforge.xquartz:0

so the grepl() on dsp doesn't match.

Best,
Stefan
#
On 26/09/2015 1:42 AM, Skye Bender-deMoll wrote:
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.

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.

Duncan
3 days later
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On 09/26/2015 03:22 AM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
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.
Great idea, I'll employ this workaround for now. Thanks!

best,
  -skye
#
On 29/09/2015 2:00 PM, Skye Bender-deMoll wrote:
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