[R-SIG-Mac] Wish for the GUI: themes

[Marc Schwartz]

On Mar 13, 2012, at 7:15 AM, Timothy Bates wrote:

> Hi,
> Teaching with R, I find the mac GUI very nice, and so do students once they see the shortcuts etc. (I don’t get why mac people would use R-Studio…)
> 
> For myself, I still use a customized Textmate command bundle to work with R.
> 
> One thing I miss in R.app at present is themes, especially this one
> 
> https://github.com/avian/TextMate-Tomorrow-Theme
> 
> It would be great if R Gui could look like this
> 	http://d.pr/CqdM
> Instead of this
> 	http://d.pr/DZjA
> 
> 
> Bes, tim


To narrowly address the "why would Mac people use R-Studio", as a user of Emacs/ESS for >10 years, the advantage is going to be primarily cross-platform support AFAICS. As one who has "evolved" from using R on Windows starting in late 2001, to RH/Fedora Linux in late 2002, to OSX in early 2009, the one constant has been Emacs/ESS.

If one is in a mixed OS environment, I can see much logic in using R-Studio, if one is not open to Emacs/ESS. It can provide a consistent and productive working environment. You don't have to deal with training on multiple "IDEs", recalling instinctively multiple methods of interacting with editors and other functionality, which increases productivity.

I have played with R-Studio and R.app. Both are good and much credit goes to the developers of both.

Also, as one who has been routinely using version control (svn) for a number of years, the support in Emacs/ESS has been extremely helpful. R-Studio appears to have support for both svn and git from what I can tell via the project functionality, though I have not played with it. I don't believe that such support is available in R.app, though I stand to be corrected on that. Of course for svn on OSX, there is always the CLI or GUI based apps such as Cornerstone.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz