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GUI for R

4 messages · Dirk Eddelbuettel, Tyler Smith, Gregor Gorjanc

Original
Dirk Eddelbuettel
# 
[ resending with 8-bit clean mail header, and one fix below --edd ]
On 7 October 2006 at 15:44, Janno Tuulik wrote:
| Hei Cristiano,
| 
| Take a look at RKWard (http://rkward.sourceforge.net) 

I would not (yet ?) recommend RKWard as it is in very stages and has fairly
incomplete coverage of R.

| (http://rosuda.org/JGR/). Unfortunately, I have never tried to install those 
| on sarge. 

The excellent JGR is a very good choice.  As Janno said, it may be tricky on
stable.  It just became a lot easier to install on unstable (and I still have
to post a short writeup) using R 2.4.0 and its new 'R CMD javareconf' which
can update R's knowledge of where your Java installation is. 

Unfortunately, JGR is still somewhat outside Debian as it wants Sun's Java
JDK so I don't think I'll ever package it directly.  Now, if someone wanted
to outside of Debian ...  In fact, the CRAN maintainers mention that
idea. Maybe one day.
| On Saturday 07 October 2006 14:11, Cristiano Natt?ro wrote:
| > Hello everybody,
| >
| >    I'm trying to use GNU R on a debian stable but I didn't manage to
| > make any GUI work. Then I saw that:
| >
| >
| > $ apt-cache show r-gnome
| > <snip>
| > As of R 2.1.0, this interface is no longer provided with the upstream
| > sources. As such, this package is now an empty stub that will be removed
| > in a subsequent revision of the Debian package.
| > ...
| >
| >
| >    Can you help me, please? I'm not keen on Gnome, any working GUI would
| > be fine.

As I tried to say here, the Gnome gui for R is no longer included upstream
and hence no longer packages for Debian.

The code does exist, though, on CRAN, so you could just fire up R and say

   > install.packages("gnomeGUI")

but note that you will have to take care of all the Build-Depends.
Alternatively, download the tarball yourself outside of R from
    
   http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/gnomeGUI_2.3.0-3.tar.gz

and say

   $ sudo R CMD INSTALL gnomeGUI_2.3.0-3.tar.gz

All that said, this (old) Gnome GUI is not all that powerful. JGR is current,
maintained, and offers a number of things standard R hasn't.

| > (BTW, is this the right place? If not where can I ask?)

It really isn't all that on-topic here.  We are running a small Debian
mailing list called r-sig-debian off the R mail server as well. That is
probably the most topical list and I'll CC it now.

Hope this helps,  Dirk (wearing his R maintainer hat)
1 day later
Tyler Smith
# 
If you are spending any significant time working in R I would highly 
recommend emacs with ESS. Both are apt-gettable for stable, testing and 
unstable. It does require a bit of time on your part, to run through the 
emacs tutorial and then the basics of ESS. However, once you do that you 
can do just about anything with it.

I started out with the very basic commands - moving around, cutting and 
pasting from a script into R. Whenever I found I was doing the same 
thing over and over I poked around until I found the emacs way to make 
it easier - Ctrl-a to jump to the beginning of a line, Ctrl-c Ctrl-f to 
send a function from a script into R, Ctrl-c Ctrl-v to open a help 
window etc.

If you already know how to use emacs then you should run, not walk, over 
to the repositories to install ESS. If you don't know emacs, it might be 
worth learning just for ESS.

Cheers,

Tyler
Gregor Gorjanc
#
Tyler Smith wrote:
I also agree with Tyler. If you do not know Emacs it might be a bit of
overkill from the beginning, however it does pay-off in long term.
Wherever I go I really miss emacs and lately also ESS.
Dirk Eddelbuettel
#
On 9 October 2006 at 14:11, Gregor Gorjanc wrote:
| Tyler Smith wrote:
| > If you are spending any significant time working in R I would highly
| > recommend emacs with ESS. Both are apt-gettable for stable, testing and
[...]
| I also agree with Tyler. If you do not know Emacs it might be a bit of
| overkill from the beginning, however it does pay-off in long term.
| Wherever I go I really miss emacs and lately also ESS.

Yes and yes but not that this is 

a) now fairly clearly off-topic on debian-science, and 

b) covered in the R FAQ as my favourite Q and A:

       6.2 Should I run R from within Emacs?
       =====================================

       Yes, _definitely_. [....]

   where all three questions in section 6 are about R and Emacs.

Cheers, Dirk