[R-SIG-Mac] R Workspace Browser filterable and sortable (pref by size)

[Hans-Jörg Bibiko]

On 26 May 2011, at 18:19, David Winsemius wrote:
> On May 26, 2011, at 11:44 AM, Timothy Bates wrote:
>> 
>> Fantastic that the revamped editor has variable finding (type yourData$ then tab if you have not already)!!
> I had not. That _is_ a nice surprise.

For the records the Mac GUI now makes usage of the rcompgen package AND it's configurable (see ?rcompgen).


> It might be more user-friendly if logic could be installed that detects when the window is at the bottom of the screen (as I generally set up my display) because the scroll is currently only "drop-down" (which disappears) and it would be nice if it would "drop-up". Or perhaps a preference switch that could be "up" or "down"?

If there's enough space under the current edited line it will come up as "drop-down" otherwise, if the RConsole window is at the bottom of the screen, it'll come up as "drop-up". In future I would like to replace the standard Mac completion approach by a self-written "narrow-down-while-typing-list", maybe including the chance to customise its appearance; and maybe to implement a kind of auto-completion. Be patient ;)


>> I often find still, however, that in a workflow I repeatedly run "names(myData)” because I can’t remember how a variable is named in a data set.
> 
> I generally use (at the console window):
> grep(patt, names(dfrm), value=TRUE)
> ... since I have 100-200 names per dataframe and I only want to see the 5- 15 names that have a particular two or three letter string in them.

Good point. Maybe we're able to improve the Workspace browser for such tasks...



>> Workspace Browser could become even more widely used and helpful if it had:
>>  1. A filter like the lovely history browser
> I had overlooked that search window at the top of the History panel. NICE.
> I guess that is the grep functionality.

For the records it's bound to key equivalent ⇧⌘H and it makes usage of Mac's ICU regex engine implemented via Cocoa's NSPredicate, ergo similar to grep :)

Cheers,
--Hans
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Hans-Joerg Bibiko
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Department of Linguistics
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