[R] any way to set X11() device geometry (screen offsets)?

[B.Rowlingson@lancaster.ac.uk]

Thomas Lumley wrote:

> It doesn't look as though this would be too hard to add. We currently put
> the lower right corner of the window 10 pixels from the lower right corner
> of the screen, but it could be made configurable (like the width and
> height). I can't actually experiment at the moment, since I'm on the wrong
> operating system.
> 

 If you cant wait for the next release of R to do this, then get the
really rather useful 'xwit' tool from ftp.x.org or a local mirror. 
It lets you position and size windows after they've been created, 
as well as several other things.

You need to get the window name of R graphics windows - run xwininfo
and click on an R graphics window and you should see something like:

xwininfo: Window id: 0x2c00002 "R Graphics: Device 2 (ACTIVE)"

and using xwit you can set its geometry exactly with:

xwit -move 200 200 -resize 640 200 -names "R Graphics: Device 2
(ACTIVE)"

You can then bung this into a function to pop up 9 windows and then call
xwit to put them in the right place:


x9_function(){
  
for(i in 1:9){
 x11()
}
for(i in 1:9){
 # compute position and size for window i
 args<-windowsizepos(i)
 # window name
 if(i==9){state<-"ACTIVE"}else{state<-"inactive"}
 name<- paste("\"R Graphics: Device ",i+1," (",state,")\"",sep='')
 system(paste("./xwit ",args," -names ",name,sep=''))
 }
}

 You need to write the windowsizepos(i) function to return a string like
this:

> windowsizepos(1)
[1] "-move 20 20 -resize 200 200"

 that gives the right position and size for the i-th window.

 It might be worth taking the code that repositions the windows and
putting
that in a separate function, so you can easily put the windows back in
the 
default place once the user has mucked with them. You might also be able
to
use the dev. functions to figure out which is the active window so you
can 
insert 'ACTIVE' or 'inactive' in the window name.

 Hours of fun.

Barry Rowlingson
Maths and Stats
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
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