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R editor for Mac

5 messages · Dan Tenenbaum, Eamonn Maguire, David Winsemius +1 more

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Since someone recently mentioned RStudio to me, I thought I would
reactivate this thread in order to mention it:

http://www.rstudio.org/

Seems pretty cool if you want the full IDE experience.

Dan
On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 6:31 AM, Gang Chen <gangchen at mail.nih.gov> wrote:
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On Mar 10, 2011, at 4:50 PM, Dan Tenenbaum wrote:

            
Just a tiny, technical side-comment:  it uses a separate process for R which has serious technical implications (you can't use any GUIs, external UI libraries, or even native devices like Quartz for example - it leads to crashes). We have tried that long time ago with the first Cocoa GUI but quickly abandoned that path. It works well for sandboxed environment (e.g. as a server) but not for a local GUI. That said, it is a very impressive attempt to learn from the rich history of all the R GUIs created so far.

Back to the original thread, though, thanks to Hans-Joerg Bibiko who did a great job there will be a big overhaul of the R Mac GUI for R 2.13.0 with a new editor.

Cheers,
Simon
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On Mar 10, 2011, at 5:09 PM, Simon Urbanek wrote:

            
Can you expand on that, Simon? Crashes when using Quartz would seem  
like an immediate deal-breaker for Mac OS X users. Does that mean that  
ordinary plotting calls would cause crashes?

I was assuming that users of RStudio would not be also using other  
GUI's, but I do not know whether I am using "external UI libraries" in  
my typical R activities using rms/Hmisc/survival. Is this in reference  
to packages such as rgl that invoke libraries such as GTK? Are Rattle  
or rggobi precluded as packages?
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On Mar 11, 2011, at 11:25 AM, David Winsemius wrote:

            
They don't use Quartz - they have their own re-implementation of Cairo which creates files which is what gets displayed in the GUI - the GUI doesn't actually use the R device directly. It's entirely different from what you get in regular R. Unfortunately it means you can't use Quartz which is already a deal-breaker for me.
In principle, yes (but I'd think that if you use Rattle it's pointless to have another GUI ;)). The actual interaction depends on the details inside their rsession part - so I can't comment on that and I didn't test the packages you mention. The bottom line is that all packages are run outside the GUI in an R embedding.

If I get a spare minute, I'm actually tempted to hack RStudio to remedy this design problem, because it would allow for example iPlots eXtreme to be used directly in the GUI which the current setup doesn't allow.

Cheers,
Simon