[R-SIG-Mac] R-app for naive users

[David Winsemius]

On Mar 7, 2010, at 5:29 PM, Ruth M. Ripley wrote:

> I have just begun to use a Mac after teaching R (with my students
> officially Windows users) for a while. It seems that the gui works
> differently from that on Windows. In particular, I quote from Simon on
> r-sig-mac
>
> "this [q()] 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, ...)"
>
> Please can you point me to some documentation that explains this and  
> any
> other similar traps for the unwary fairly knowledgeable R user. My
> audience are very naive Mac users, e.g. they cannot possibly find  
> hidden
> files as they do not know what a terminal is.

I happen to think the use of Terminal.app is a basic skill needed by  
all users. I have move it to the Dock. (I have been a Mac user on and  
off for decades.)

The other problem (which is not unlike some similar problems faced by  
Windows users) is the "hidden" status of .Rprofile under the default  
settings of Finder.app. I have gone with globally unhiding the dot- 
files in Finder.app, although that may not be wise for total newbies.

There is a Mac section of the Installation Manual and an R-Mac FAQ:

http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/RMacOSX-FAQ.html

(It looks somewhat out of data, unfortunately. And it could use some  
revisions since the 4.5.3 entry is intended to be the Edit menu  
section. The menu items have slightly  different names, and on my  
machine there is no Bioconductor menu item (although there is one in a  
pulldown box inside a dialog). I did not see a Window menu item  
description, and that is the menu I use most often.)


> I would like to be able to
> help them but am struggling myself. e.g. They may know what the  
> switch on
> the toolbar means, but I do not.

Mousing over GUI tool bar buttons brings up a brief description on my  
machine.

> I certainly would not guess that a button
> with a tooltip Quit R would not do the same as q().
>
> I also maintain an R package in which I work very hard to make  
> everything
> platform independent. Is the Mac a special case? It is hard to quit R
> without an option to save on either Linux or Windows.

There are some who will undoubtedly tell you to stop using the GUI,  
but I am a committed Mac-R-GUI user.

>
> Other differences I have noted are 1) I cannot search in the help  
> pages
> and

That is a minor annoyance. I will either search out the same page with  
RSiteSearch() and search with my web-browser, or select, copy, paste  
to a Textedit.app window

> 2) when I copy and paste from an example in a help page I have to do
> it line by line or I cannot adjust it line by line.

a) I don't understand. I often copy-paste multiple lines from help  
pages, and edit  before committing the changes with a <return>. You  
can edit on multiple lines on the console.  Sometimes I need to add an  
extra command and then using ";" is needed to act as a command  
separator. I have on occasion had problems with help page examples not  
pasting correctly that were solved by using example(),

b) Copy, open R editing window, paste.

> Workarounds for either
> would be very much appreciated.

Graphics devices are different. Use capabilities() to see the  
available devices. The default graphic device is quartz() (not Quartz)  
and saving files from the GUI defaults (with no options) to pdf(). I  
generally want tiff versions and I use Preview.app to open the pdf  
files and save as tiff. (Yes, I know that I could make tiffs from the  
R environment directly.)

One gotcha is that the Quartz menu item does not shift focus to the  
graphics window. I cannot tell you how many times I tried that before  
finally learning that I need to use the choice off the Window menu.  
And I now never use that menu since I have learned to use all the  
corresponding keystrokes

I have not yet figured out how to fix my broken R connection with my  
Symbol font.

Figuring out how to keep all my packages in the R.Framework tree was a  
challenge, since I had managed to add the User/Library tree with the  
Installer.   If you have done that you can consolidate by dragging the  
User/Library copies to the correct position in the R.Framework tree  
and using .libPaths() to remove the extra location.

Sometimes linking out to pdf files from help pages will hang R. I try  
to remember not to do that. The "Help topics matching ___" window  
opened by "??" will sometimes get itself tied up in knots and fail to  
open any selected help pages. Saving and restarting R is the only  
action I have been able to get to succeed in that situation.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ruth
> -- 
> Ruth M. Ripley,                         Email:ruth at stats.ox.ac.uk
> Dept. of Statistics,                    http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ruth/
> University of Oxford,                   Tel:   01865 282851
> 1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK  Fax:   01865 272595
>
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David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT