[Rd] getGraphicsEvent on X11 and event queuing

[frederik at ofb.net]

... I just realized that setGraphicsEventHandlers or getGraphicsEvent
could have an 'onIdle' callback, to be called somewhere in the polling
loop of gevents.c:163 - I think this would solve my problem #2 in a
minimally disruptive way.

On Mon, Jun 06, 2016 at 06:38:45PM -0700, frederik at ofb.net wrote:
> Hi R-Devel,
> 
> I've been working on an oscilloscope project using an Arduino
> microcontroller board. I found that it's quite easy to get realtime
> updates, e.g. 30+ frames per second, if I read data from the board in
> a little Rcpp library. I have to use dev.hold() and dev.flush() to
> keep the plot from flickering, which restricts me to the "cairo" X11
> device.
> 
> I'd like to be able to add interactivity to the oscilloscope display,
> for instance to bind a key to save the current plot to a file, or to
> bind keys for adjusting the time scale etc.
> 
> However, I ran into two problems:
> 
> (1) setGraphicsEventHandlers only works on the "Xlib" X11 device,
> which doesn't support buffering via dev.hold() - it flickers.
> 
> (2) getGraphicsEvent and friends lack some interface features which
> are needed to use the functions in an asynchronous fashion. Typically,
> event listener library functions have a "timeout" parameter, and the
> ability to return already-queued events. But getGraphicsEvent() has
> neither - it waits indefinitely (you can't set a timeout), and it
> seems to ignore events which occurred before it was called (I can't
> figure out why, from the code, I guess the normal R event processing
> grabs events which occur between calls to getGraphicsEvent?).
> 
> It seems like it should be possible to set a handler for keyboard
> events and have it execute in between plot updates when the user
> presses a key - yet without blocking further updates if no key has
> been pressed.
> 
> Is anyone interested in fixing (1) and (2)? Or is there some other
> library or workaround to solve my problems?
> 
> Here is some code I used to play around with these functions:
> 
>     X11(type="Xlib");
> 
>     keydown = function(key) {
>       cat("Got key: ",key);
>         lastkey <<- key
>         }
> 
>     setGraphicsEventHandlers(onKeybd = keydown);
> 
>     plot(c(0,0));
>     getGraphicsEvent();
> 
> Well, I think it's great that getGraphicsEvent exists at all, and want
> to salute Duncan Murdoch who is listed as the author. I hope I may
> have helped by describing some new possible uses for these functions.
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> Frederick
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>