Skip to content

R can not show plots (in Mac OS X terminal)

8 messages · David Ruau, Tony Han Bao, Thomas Lumley +3 more

#
Dear all:

I am a newbie in Mac. Just installed R and found R did not react on my 
command plot (I use command line in terminal). It did not give me any 
error message, either. All it did was just giving out a new command 
prompt--no reaction to the plot command. I suppose whenever I gives out 
a command of plot, it will invoke the AquaTerm for a small graph, as I 
experience in octave. What can I do for it?

Many thanks,
Minyu Chen
#
On 5 Apr 2005, at 19:12, Minyu Chen wrote:

            
issue command

 >getOption("device")

to check the output device. The default I have on OS X is X11, do you 
have it installed before compiling R?

It could also be the case that you issued command such as postscript() 
before plot(...) but forgot to issue dev.off().
Tony Han Bao
tonybao at mac.com
#
Hi,
You should use X11. It doesn't work in Terminal.
You can use the basic Xterm in X11 or like I do Aterm.

David Ruau
On Apr 5, 2005, at 20:12, Minyu Chen wrote:

            
#
Hi
On 6 Apr 2005, at 10:47, David Ruau wrote:

            
To make Apple's Terminal use X11 first one should set the DISPLAY 
environment variable

if you are using bash, put the following line in .bash_profile

[[ -z $DISPLAY ]] && export DISPLAY=":0.0"
Tony Han Bao
tonybao at mac.com
#
On Wed, 6 Apr 2005, David Ruau wrote:

            
This is not actually true.  It does work in Terminal, you just have to 
specify the DISPLAY, either in the shell before entering R
%  setenv DISPLAY :0
or when you call x11()
-thomas
#
Did you install R from source code, or did you install the binary?

If you installed the binary, then you can start R by double-clicking 
on the R application icon. Then your default graphics device will not 
require X windows, and will be fully interactive (in the R sense).

If you installed from source code, you may or may not have the 
double-clickable application, depending on what configuration options 
you specified.

If you don't want to use the GUI interface provided by the binary 
download, then you will have the best results if you work in the X 
windows environment, in my opinion (there are other opinions). You 
can work in the X  windows environment with either the binary 
installation, or if you installed from source.

Obviously, however, you have to have X Windows installed in order to 
use it with R -- and if you installed R from source code, you need to 
install X Windows *before* installing R. I don't know if order 
matters if you installed the binary.

If you don't want to use the GUI, and don't want to use X Windows, 
then you are operating outside of my experience. But try starting a 
graphics device using

     quartz()

*before* issuing any plot() command. See also

   ?Devices

I believe there may be alternatives to what I've outlined here, but I 
don't know what they are.

-Don
At 7:12 PM +0100 4/5/05, Minyu Chen wrote:

  
    
#
Thank you very much. This is very informative and I already save it for 
future reference. Now I got the double clicking icon (quite 
mysteriously, since I tried several ways recommended by others, so I 
don't know which one make it works).

Thanks,
Minyu Chen
On 6 Apr 2005, at 16:11, Don MacQueen wrote:

            
#
This is incorrect. x11(display="0:0") opens an x11 graphics device from the
terminal assuming (1) that you have installed X11 from Apple's website and
(2) that x11 is running.

Cheers, George
On 4/6/05 5:47 AM, "David Ruau" <David.Ruau at rwth-aachen.de> wrote:

            
==================================================================
George W. Gilchrist                        Email #1: gwgilc at wm.edu
Department of Biology, Box 8795          Email #2: kitesci at cox.net
College of William & Mary                    Phone: (757) 221-7751
Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795                    Fax: (757) 221-6483
http://gwgilc.people.wm.edu/