[R-gui] wxPython R GUI toolkit

[John Fox]

Dear Philippe et al.,

It's not clear to me how the Rcmdr package fits into this, more general,
discussion about GUIs for R. I initially wrote the package because I wanted
to use R in introductory social-statistics classes for which the
command-line interface isn't really appropriate -- and after waiting for
quite a while for something else to appear. Although I expect that
eventually someone will come up with a better basic-statistics GUI, or even
something more ambitious, I note that this hasn't happened yet -- at least
not that I'm aware.

With respect to the further development of the Rcmdr package, I'm open to
suggestions. If nothing else, the code can use some cleaning up, and if it
can be made independent of Tcl/Tk without an unreasonable amount of work,
I'm open to that as well. The useR conference should provide a forum for
discussing these and related questions.

Regards,
 John

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Philippe Grosjean [mailto:phgrosjean at sciviews.org] 
> Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2004 6:37 AM
> To: r-sig-gui at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Cc: James Wettenhall; Greg Riddick; jfox at mcmaster.ca
> Subject: RE: [R-gui] wxPython R GUI toolkit
> 
> James,
> 
> >Sorry if this seems like rehashing the past, but I'm trying 
> to at least 
> >cite actual examples, compilers etc. not just discuss general GUI 
> >philosophies for the future...
> >[...]
> 
> If you succeed in using wxWindows (or wxPython) from R, it is 
> nice. However, speaking about "actual examples", I think R 
> Commander with Tcl/Tk is one (OK, we have already discussed, 
> some people do not like much TclTk)... Don't you think it 
> should be possible to make a core R code, and make the 
> "widget part" interchangeable. That is, and application like 
> R Commander that uses TclTk currently could be adapted to use 
> alternatively wxWindows, Gtk, or whatever... providing the 
> corresponding dialog boxes are coded with the given widgets? 
> At the end, the user could choose its preferred GUI.
> 
> Well, I see many problems here, because the different 
> libraries have different widgets and manage then also quite 
> differently... but at least, we could try. This would require:
> 
> 1) To rewrite R Commander so that it can work with other 
> graphical widgets than TclTk. That is only a decision that 
> John Fox can take. I did a SciViews compatible version of R 
> Commander with a very different interface that the standard 
> one quite easily, because John's code is written in a way 
> that permits it quite easily.
> 
> 2) Once it is done, we would have a basis to try on an actual 
> application (that is, R Commander), these various libraries. 
> I think it should be very useful and much more constructive 
> to work on actual applications.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Philippe Grosjean
> 
> .......................................................<?}))><....
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> ( ( ( ( (   Prof. Philippe Grosjean
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