[R-SIG-Mac] Beachball on quartz windows (command line only)

[Simon Urbanek]

On Jan 22, 2007, at 5:58 PM, Emmanuel Sharef wrote:

> Hello,
>
> When plotting from R in the command line (run in the Terminal, not as
> R.app), it behaves oddly.
>
> If I simply type a command to plot something (e.g. hist(rnorm
> (1000))  ), nothing happens.
> If I type quartz(), an empty quartz window opens, but the mouse
> cursor always turns into a spinning beachball when passing over it. I
> can plot to this window, but I cannot move or close it, because of
> the beach ball. Calling the quartz.save() function referenced in the
> R Mac FAQ returns 'Error: could not find function "quartz.save"'.
>
> Everything works fine inside R.app though. Running R in an X11 xterm
> works fine too, but quartz graphics are nicer. Is there a way to fix
> the problem with getting quartz graphics from the terminal?
>

Quartz was designed to work with R.app. As R warns you, Quartz  
doesn't interact with you if there is no event loop running and in  
Terminal on ESS there is none. However, I have just put together a  
hack that will help a bit - install and load CarbonEL:
install.packages("CarbonEL",,"http://rforge.net/")
library(CarbonEL)

As soon as you load CarbonEL, Quartz becomes usable, because the  
package installs a Carbon event loop which can driver Quartz. In  
R.app this is not needed, because R.app provides its own event loop.

Cheers,
Simon