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

[Ruth M. Ripley]

David,

Many thanks for your helpful comments.

I am still struggling to get consistent behavior from the Mac. For myself
I think I will stick to R in the terminal as that works more or less
platform independently.

For my students, I will just warn them not to expect the R.app to work at
all like the RGui which I demo. Since I do not really know which
differences are features and which are likely to alter, I don't think it
worth my while reseaching and teaching many details.

The cut and paste problem: I have a habit of wanting to alter and rerun
just one line of a pasted block. But that's probably just what has been
convenient for me up to now.

As for libraries, I don't even know what a framework tree is yet. I will
have to find out...

Regards,

Ruth

On Wed, 24 Mar 2010, David Winsemius wrote:

>
> 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
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > R-SIG-Mac mailing list
> > R-SIG-Mac at stat.math.ethz.ch
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
>
> David Winsemius, MD
> West Hartford, CT
>
>