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

ian fellows ian.fellows at stat.ucla.edu
Fri Mar 26 09:15:16 CET 2010 

Ruth,

One option is to go with the platform independent JGR GUI. I've made  
some one-step installers, which are available at: http:// 
www.deducer.org/pmwiki/index.php?n=Main.DownloadingAndInstallingDeducer

The installers also install R, JGR and the Deducer package which you  
may (or may not) be interested in from a teaching perspective.


Cheers,
Ian




On Mar 25, 2010, at 6:30 PM, Ruth M. Ripley wrote:

> 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
>>
>>
>
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