[R] GUI's for R

[Marc Schwartz]

On Fri, 2003-12-05 at 10:32, Gerald.Jean at spgdag.ca wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am not currently using R but I have been using S+ for sevaral years.  I
> think that I fit in the category of power users, never using the GUI
> prefering the flexibility of a command line interface (CLI).  In a short
> while I will try to move to R, that is if we can convince our IT people
> that installing a freeware package on a Unix server will not damaged the
> companie's network!  The main reasons for which I want to move to R, at
> least give it a try, are 1) David Smith of Insightful annonced us a couple
> months ago that there is not plan to further develop the 6.0.4 Release 1
> for Sun SPARC, SunOS 5.8, 64-bit version of S+ and as we deal with very
> large problems, addressing well over 4GB of memory, a 64 bit version is
> required and we bought that Sun machine for this sole purpose. 2) From what
> I read and heard R manages its memory a little better than S+ and is a
> little faster, non negligeable aspects when dealing with large problems.
> 
> All I said so far has little to do with the title of this email.  I am
> getting to it.  While I am pretty happy with a CLI I was asked to evaluate
> a few statistical packages to be used by casual users in my group.  One of
> the main requirements is ease of use, hence the GUI, furthermore, it will
> be a lot easier for me to support them in their analyses if we use the same
> software.
> 
> I spent the two last days reading the R-FAQ and searching the R groups mail
> archives, including the R-GUI mail group and as a consequence of all this
> reading I am a bit confused.  At first I gathered that there was no GUI for
> R, that R was strickly a CLI language.  What brought me to that conclusion
> is the fact that on the R-project pages they refer the readers to external
> builders of GUIs like the R-Commander of John Fox, Brodgar, TeXmacs,
> SciViews etc..  On the other hand searching the mail archives for the word
> "R-GUI" yielded well over 500 hits.  After reading a few tens of those I
> realized that there existed, after building R, an executable called
> "Rgui.exe", what is that? is that a GUI version of R or not? can someone
> set my bearings straight on that issue?
> 
> Thanks in advance for your valuable comments,

I will defer to others with more experience on your particular platform
queries.

Rgui.exe is the Windows 'front end' environment for R that provides a
command line console for entering commands to the R interpreter, seeing
the textual output of those commands and for displaying the output of
plots. It supports a MDI/SDI type of interface. It does have some menus
for simple operations (like installing and updating packages) but not
for performing analyses. It is Windows OS only.

The default R installation is a CLI interface. If you wish to add a GUI
for performing "point and click" analyses, the sources that you list
would be appropriate for consideration. If you require a cross-platform
GUI for a multi-OS environment, John Fox's RCmdr would be a very good
choice since it is built with Tcl/Tk and is not OS specific.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz