[R-SIG-Mac] RAqua, Darwin/X11 R, and tcltk

[Jan de Leeuw]

What does not work:

 From the terminal, use quartz(). The quartz device does not receive
events and cannot be made the front window. This does not work
because the API to access the windowmanager from the command line
is hidden by Apple. Would be nice if it worked, though.

 From the terminal, use library(tcltk). This gives a segmentation error.
Now I wonder what would happen if I replaced tcltk.so in  
/usr/local/lib/R
by a  version build by using X11 tcltk. More generally, since R is  
compiled with
both X11 and Aqua support, and since there are two copies of tcltk.so
anyway (one in RAqua and one in /usr/local/lib/R) it would make sense
to configure in such a way that these two versions were indeed the
Aqua and X11 versions.

 From RAqua, use library(tcltk) and demo(tkdensity). This creates the
windows nicely, but they cannot handle events. This is the one that  
really
should work.

What does work:

 From RAqua, use library(tcltk), tkStartGUI(). This creates a tk  
terminal,
where you can say demo(tkdensity). This is obviously not elegant --  
because
tkStartGUI() is not a serious GUI, and because you don't want two  
consoles
active at the same time.

Use IDLE, load Rpy. Then R.library("tcltk") and R.demo("tkdensity")  
works.
That's a bad hack, of course, but it's interesting anyway.
===
Jan de Leeuw; Professor and Chair, UCLA Department of Statistics;
Editor: Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Journal of Statistical  
Software
US mail: 8130 Math Sciences Bldg, Box 951554, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1554
phone (310)-825-9550;  fax (310)-206-5658;  email: deleeuw at stat.ucla.edu
homepage: http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu
   
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