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

[Philippe Grosjean]

>On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 10:15:10AM -0400, John Fox 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.

Dirk Eddelbuettel answered:
>That won't work as it is Windows-only. IIRC even Philippe now acknowledges
>that this is suboptimal.

Don't let me say what I did not said! I just said that the way I solved the
problems of windows overlap is suboptimal. However, I agree that there are
other (minor) problems in the current version of SciViews Insider (0.3.3),
and there are also some bugs that occur irregularly and that could be traced
down to some incompatibilities between the way R is build (with event loop,
and so), and the way the GUI should work (event-driven application). This
results in some problems with COM massively used in Insider. I think Thomas
Baier had similar problems in its R-(D)COM server, but I think this is now
solved in its latest version (?).

>AFAICT the emerging consensus has been for quite some time to move to
>wxWindows (now called wxWidgets). But someone needs to do the work...

Although, I am 1000% favorable to a platform-independent solution. However,
it is still a delicate task to make it on top of R. At first sight, it is
not such a huge task, but when you start to actually implement it, you
realize that there are a lot of problems you did not expected. Given that,
there could be no "emerging consensus" for one or the other virtual
solution... especially if nobody actually implement it!

I think such kind of discussion should be best conducted in the
corresponding "island" at UseR! However, why not to initiate it now already?

OK. Since we speak about SciViews, here is what you should know:
- Since last version, I got a lot of feedback (mostly my students), and I
try to take also into account all remarks made by others (including you,
Dirk).

- So, in summary, the conclusions about SciViews Insider is that it is not
and would never be easily transposable to another platform than Windows.
Also, it is probably too complex for most users, and certainly for volunteer
programmers that would like to participate in its development... and Visual
Basic is definitely not the right language for that, because few people here
master it.

- Given these results, I decided to rewrite a GUI for R which save the best
from SciViews Insider, but which moves towards expectations of most of you.
It is still VB (because I reuse some part of the code of SciViews Insider),
but a large part is moved into R code (in a SciViews R package), dynamic
HTML and javascript, that is, platform-independent languages. The rest will
be easier to implement in TclTk, wxWidgets, Java (there is the JGR project),
GTK, or whatever.

- Under Windows, the result is a ligthweight GUI *on top of R Console in SDI
mode* (called SciViews R Console). It means it works hand in hand with Rgui,
instead of replacing it completelly. This is, I think the only way if we
want a GUI for Windows ready in a few months... Of course, a replacement of
Rgui could be planned in the future, if there is both needs and volunteers
to do the job. Personnally, I support Duncan Murdoch's plan to move Rgui
features in an Rgui package.

- It is possible to switch between plain Rgui and SciViews R Console *in the
same session*, that is, no need to restart R to switch between these two
interfaces.

- Since it works hand in hand with Rgui, it is 100% compatible with it.

- The most important aspects in the GUI is not just to offer a GUI... it is
to offer new features that ease the use of the software. That is why we have
now an object explorer, views (with nicely formatted tables and graphs), a
reporting complement application (HTML format currently, but LaTeX and RTF
should be supported in the future). All this takes time to develop. It is
implemented in collaboration with Eric Lecoutre (author of the R2HTML
package).

- All this will be available very soon. However, here are some screenshots
for the most impatient ones ;-)
http://www.sciviews.org/software/rconsole.htm

- I would really be happy if we all start to collaborate on common parts of
the GUI (code that can be implemented in R code, HTML, ...) and then
everybody is free to wrap his own favorite widgets, menus and toolbars on
top of this core GUI code, and for his favorite platform. I believe it is
possible but we have to think in a truly collaborative way,... and stop
these endless and useless discussions on "I want XYwidgets!"... "naaa, I
want YXgraphBetterLookingToolkit!"...

Best,

Philippe Grosjean