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

[David Winsemius]

On May 26, 2011, at 1:10 PM, Hans-Jörg Bibiko wrote:

>
> 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 ;)
>

For me running R 2.13.0 beta under OSX 10.5.8 with GUI 1.41 (5800)  
x86_64-apple-darwin9.8.0,  it still only "drops-down", (and  
effectively disappears) even when I make a special effort to bump the  
console border against the bottom of my screen. (There had been a  
small gap when I tried it before). But maybe this difference in  
behavior is because I have not yet seen sufficient reason to take my  
Leopard onto Snow country.

On the other hand I discovered that I can replace much of my grepping  
if I know the starting letters. AND I can then "arrow-scroll" through  
the more constrained choices. Nice.

I guess I would have thought that the default should be to "drop-up"  
since one would be expected to be typing near the bottom of the  
screen. Just a thought. I was reasonably happy with just grepping at  
the command line.  Please take my thanks for everything done to  
improve this platform. You guys are doing a great job of supporting us  
for very little pay, so I very much hope your respective organizations  
are treating you well.


-- 
david.




>
>>> 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
> **********************************************************
> Hans-Joerg Bibiko
> Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
> Department of Linguistics
> Deutscher Platz 6     phone:   +49 (0) 341 3550 341
> D-04103 Leipzig       fax:     +49 (0) 341 3550 333
> Germany               e-mail:  bibiko[-at-]eva.mpg.de
> **********************************************************
>

David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT