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

[Simon Urbanek]

David,

On May 26, 2011, at 1:53 PM, David Winsemius wrote:

> 
> 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"

It's nor our call - it's not us actually creating and any drop-down or up - it's your system (we are only providing the list of completion strings) so the behavior appears to be a bug in the OS that has been fixed in Snow Leopard. So, as Hans said, until we create our own custom completion UI (which he suggested) you get what your system gives you  ;).

Cheers,
Simon


> 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
> 
> _______________________________________________
> R-SIG-Mac mailing list
> R-SIG-Mac at r-project.org
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac