[R-SIG-Mac] R.app intractable history problem

[Simon Urbanek]

On Nov 5, 2009, at 8:36, Rob Goedman <robjgoedman at me.com> wrote:

> This is clearly a bug.

Can you point me to the docs that support that claim? AFAIR q/quit  
exits R without any regard to things open in the GUI - it's not what  
you usually want - most users will prefer the normal app shutdown  
using close or quit menu.


> Thanks Gaël! Just now tried it (on SnowLeopard) and it shows the sam 
> e behavior.
>
> In R.app, q() should also get to the point where it will close the  
> console window (which is where we update preferences, history etc).

This was never intended to work in the GUI because it entirely  
bypasses the app quitting mechanism. You should never use q/quit in  
the GUI unless you really mean to exit R right away and discard  
everything (history, all open files, ...)


> I'll check the sources to see if and why it is not (or no longer?)  
> getting to that point.

It never did since the GUI has no control over the quit function which  
exits the process regardless of the GUI

(I'm not saying this is the best way to do it, but that is the design  
so far.. It will require modification to R itself to change this...)

Cheers,
S



Sent from my iPhone


>
> Thanks for staying with this!
>
> Rob
>
>
> On Nov 5, 2009, at 7:52 AM, Vishy Iyer wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 2:49 AM, Gaël Laurans <glaurans at gmail.com>  
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> The way you quit R seems to make a difference. If you use the menu  
>>> or the
>>> Cmd+Q shortcut, R.app will save its history in the file defined in  
>>> the
>>> preferences, but if you type quit() at the R prompt, R.app will  
>>> not save its
>>> history at all.
>>>
>>>
>> Wow, this completely solved my problem! I couldn't find this  
>> documented
>> anywhere, but as you said, if I quit R.app using the menu command  
>> or Cmd+Q
>> or the switch icon on the top right of the GUI, it writes the  
>> history file
>> properly. I don't even need to save the workspace anymore! But if I  
>> quit
>> with q(), which is what I was doing all this time before,  
>> the .Rhistory file
>> was always empty. I guess I was running into the problem of R always
>> overwriting R.app.
>>
>> I still need to check into the issue of the renaming of the history  
>> file
>> (changing automatically from my name to ".Rhistory") but I bet it's  
>> related
>> to the same thing of how I quit. Rob to answer your question, I can  
>> indeed
>> make changes to the preferences and they ARE carried over into the  
>> next
>> session (as long as it's not renaming the history file). So thanks  
>> again for
>> all the help!
>> V.
>>
>>    [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
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