[R-SIG-Mac] R editor for Mac

Fri Mar 11 18:44:08 CET 2011

On Mar 11, 2011, at 11:25 AM, David Winsemius wrote:

> 
> On Mar 10, 2011, at 5:09 PM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Mar 10, 2011, at 4:50 PM, Dan Tenenbaum wrote:
>> 
>>> Since someone recently mentioned RStudio to me, I thought I would
>>> reactivate this thread in order to mention it:
>>> 
>>> http://www.rstudio.org/
>>> 
>>> Seems pretty cool if you want the full IDE experience.
>>> 
>> 
>> Just a tiny, technical side-comment:  it uses a separate process for R which has serious technical implications (you can't use any GUIs, external UI libraries, or even native devices like Quartz for example - it leads to crashes).
> 
> Can you expand on that, Simon? Crashes when using Quartz would seem like an immediate deal-breaker for Mac OS X users. Does that mean that ordinary plotting calls would cause crashes?
> 

They don't use Quartz - they have their own re-implementation of Cairo which creates files which is what gets displayed in the GUI - the GUI doesn't actually use the R device directly. It's entirely different from what you get in regular R. Unfortunately it means you can't use Quartz which is already a deal-breaker for me.

> I was assuming that users of RStudio would not be also using other GUI's, but I do not know whether I am using "external UI libraries" in my typical R activities using rms/Hmisc/survival. Is this in reference to packages such as rgl that invoke libraries such as GTK? Are Rattle or rggobi precluded as packages?
> 

In principle, yes (but I'd think that if you use Rattle it's pointless to have another GUI ;)). The actual interaction depends on the details inside their rsession part - so I can't comment on that and I didn't test the packages you mention. The bottom line is that all packages are run outside the GUI in an R embedding.

If I get a spare minute, I'm actually tempted to hack RStudio to remedy this design problem, because it would allow for example iPlots eXtreme to be used directly in the GUI which the current setup doesn't allow.

Cheers,
Simon

> -- 
> David.
> 
> 
>> We have tried that long time ago with the first Cocoa GUI but quickly abandoned that path. It works well for sandboxed environment (e.g. as a server) but not for a local GUI. That said, it is a very impressive attempt to learn from the rich history of all the R GUIs created so far.
>> 
>> Back to the original thread, though, thanks to Hans-Joerg Bibiko who did a great job there will be a big overhaul of the R Mac GUI for R 2.13.0 with a new editor.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Simon
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 6:31 AM, Gang Chen <gangchen at mail.nih.gov> wrote:
>>>> Good to know that. Thanks a lot, Yan Zhou!
>>>> 
>>>> Gang
>>>> 
>>>> On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Yan Zhou <zhouyan at me.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Holding the option key while selecting text, you can select the columns.
>>>>> This is built into the Mac OS X and available in many Mac "native" text
>>>>> editor like textmate, textwrangler, bbedit, etc, even the system's TextEdit
>>>>> can do that.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Meanwhile Vim can do column selection with the blockwise-visual (CTRL-V is
>>>>> the default shortcuts). I don't use Emacs but heard it can do it, too. So
>>>>> select, copy paste and replace columns is nothing special at all.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Jan 29, 2011, at 2:04 PM, Gang Chen wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> I use nedit on daily basis because I usually run R on the Mac terminal or
>>>>>> X11, not in the R GUI window. One feature I like nedit most is that I can
>>>>>> select, copy, paste, and replace columns. Anybody know whether such a
>>>>>> feature is available in other editors such as TextWrangler?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Thanks a lot for sharing the syntax highlighting file, Christian! I'll
>>>>> try
>>>>>> it out soon. Do you know if there is any way to execute a highlighted
>>>>>> portion of the R code in nedit?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Cheers,
>>>>>> Gang
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 8:04 AM, cstrato <cstrato at aon.at> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Dear All,
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Although this question was asked and answered many times, one editor was
>>>>>>> never mentioned:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> As a long-time Mac user I prefer "nedit" for the following reasons:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> - it was developed by people who wanted to have a Mac-like editor on
>>>>> Linux
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> - it is almost as powerful as emacs but much easier to use and much
>>>>> faster
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> - it has built-in syntax highlighting for many languages
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> - it has also syntax highlighting for R, simply install "R-5.3.pats"
>>>>>>> (which I attach)
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> - it is incredible fast, e.g.:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> -- it can open text files of sizes larger than 500 MB in few seconds
>>>>>>>   (e.g. the Affymetrix annotation file
>>>>>>> HuEx-1_0-st-v2.na31.hg19.probeset.csv)
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> -- searching such large files is also incredible fast
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> -- it opens a C++ source code with 10,000 lines immediately (in
>>>>>>> contrast to emacs)
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> For these reasons I use nedit daily since more than 10 years on both
>>>>>>> Linux and Mac.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Best regards
>>>>>>> Christian
>>>>>>> _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._
>>>>>>> C.h.r.i.s.t.i.a.n   S.t.r.a.t.o.w.a
>>>>>>> V.i.e.n.n.a           A.u.s.t.r.i.a
>>>>>>> e.m.a.i.l:        cstrato at aon.at
>>>>>>> _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
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>>>>>> 
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>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>> 
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>>>> 
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>>> 
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>> 
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> 
> David Winsemius, MD
> West Hartford, CT
> 
> 