[R-SIG-Mac] Problems with Rcmdr via XQuartz on OSX Mavericks

[John Fox]

Dear Peter,

Thank you very much for taking a look at this problem and for confirming that the problem is general to tcltk.

I coincidentally just send a message to the list with the same conclusion -- that the problem occurs in R.app but not in a terminal window.

Best,
 John

On Wed, 20 Nov 2013 21:17:40 +0100
 peter dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com> wrote:
> Notes inlined below,
> 
> -pd
> 
> 
> On 20 Nov 2013, at 18:19 , John Fox <jfox at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
> 
> > Dear Jonathan et al,
> > 
> > First, thank you to all who responded. As I said, I haven't noticed this problem myself, but I'll try again on my Mac later today when I have some time and see whether I can reproduce it. I suspect that this is a tcltk-related issue, not specific to the Rcmdr, but I don't know that for sure.
> > 
> 
> Affirmative. You can get similar behaviour from library(tcltk); demo(tkfaq) in R.app. It doesn’t seem to be happening with R in a Terminal window.
> 
> You can snap out of it temporarily by switching to the R console and back.
> 
> So a working hypothesis is that something is "backgrounding" the R process after a while, if it doesn’t have input focus. Since the tcltk event loop runs off the keyboard loop, we have the trouble. My take is that someone needs to take a look at how R.app handles keyboard input, in particular the timeout aspect. 
> 
> 
> > In the meantime, here are two things to try:
> > 
> > (1) Reijo Sund suggested trying to run R and the Rcmdr from the command line (i.e., in a terminal window), to see whether the problem manifests itself there. The Rcmdr doesn't need R.app. 
> > 
> > (2) It's possible that the slowdown is caused by the way that the Rcmdr handles R Markdown documents. The overhead gets greater as the session proceeds. To test this possibility, you could suppress the R Markdown tab (via the Rcmdr Tools -> Options menu, Output tab -- uncheck the box for R Markdown) and see whether the problem disappears.
> > 
> 
> Negative. I see the issue even with an older Rcmdr version without the Markdown stuff.
> 
> > Please let me know what happens.
> 
> -- 
> Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
> Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
> Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
> Phone: (+45)38153501
> Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

------------------------------------------------
John Fox
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/