[R-gui] Editor in R and Windows focus problems

Duncan Murdoch dmurdoch at pair.com
Thu Apr 29 17:03:59 CEST 2004


On Thu, 29 Apr 2004 10:15:10 -0400, "John Fox" <jfox at mcmaster.ca>
wrote :

>Dear Philippe, Duncan, et al.,
>
>I hesitate to volunteer other people's work, but I wonder whether it isn't
>time to think about replacing the GraphApp-based Rgui as the standard
>interface to R under Windows. In particular, it occurs to me that a
>scaled-down version of Philippe's SciViews -- including a basic set of
>menus, the Syn text editor, and perhaps an object browser -- would provide a
>superior interface. Of course, there may be obstacles that I don't
>understand.

I agree this would be a good idea.  It's somewhat hard now, because
the programming interface between the R computing engine (and event
loop) and the front-end is not well documented.

What I'm thinking of doing is creating an RGui package.  At first this
will be just a standard package, collecting together the functions
relating to RGui (and some new ones, following Philippe's requests).
In the longer term it will actually contain RGui itself, which will
have been separated out from R.

By that later date, I'm hoping the program interface will be well
enough established that Philippe or someone else could put together
another front end that wouldn't be a maintenance nightmare.

The part I'm doing isn't really a huge undertaking, but I'm busy like
everyone else, so I tend to doubt all of it will be finished in time
for the 2.0 release in the fall. But I think some progress will be
made.

Duncan Murdoch



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