[Rd] Script editor for Windows GUI

[Duncan Murdoch]

On Wed, 25 Feb 2004 13:10:08 +0000, Chris Jackson
<chris.jackson at imperial.ac.uk> wrote :

>Dear R users / devs,
>
>There's been requests in the past for a text editor built into the Rgui 
>for Windows, from which code can be submitted to the R console.  
>Something along the lines of the script editor in S-Plus. ...

>So I'd like to write one and contribute it. 

I think that would be fantastic.  

> I've had a quick mess with 
>the code, and I've now got a partially usable editor working.   Before I 
>go any further and implement it fully,  I just wanted to ask whether 
>this is a desirable thing for R.  In case there are long-term plans to 
>scrap and rewrite the whole Rgui code base...  

The "graphapp" user interface library that Rgui currently uses is
likely to disappear as soon as someone has the energy to replace it --
but this might not be soon.  If you can write your editor in a way
that it could avoid graphapp, or narrowly compartmentalize your calls
to it (so that they could be replaced by calls to a different library
relatively painlessly), that would be a very good thing.

The other thing that may change sometime in the future is the whole
event loop structure, but there will have to be an event loop of some
sort, so we can hope that shouldn't affect you too much.

I'll be happy to help you with any questions that come up.

Duncan Murdoch