[R-SIG-Mac] Command Line Quartz Device in Yosemite

[Colin A. Smith]

I’ve been using command line R fairly successfully under Yosemite so far and have only run into a few issues, mostly related to the quartz device.

First, it seems that under Yosemite, the default device is now x11 instead of quartz. I found this with the exact same pkg install of R that I was using in Mavericks, which defaulted to quartz. Installing the latest Mavericks build (3.1.1) results in the same behavior. Even when running "R_DEFAULT_DEVICE=quartz R”, the default device still ends up being x11. The quartz device can still be created manually with a call to quartz(). Does anyone else have this same problem?

Second, the menus for the quartz device created through the command line have gotten even stranger under Yosemite. With the current version there are actually two (!) Apple menus displayed, which looks quite odd:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21171664/R_Two_Apple_Menus.png

About a year ago I submitted a patch with made the command line quartz device act much more like a normal OS X application:

https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=15438#c1

This patch continues to work well under Yosemite, and does not display the double Apple menu problem. However, it seems to have currently fallen off the radar. Given the even stranger behavior of the current code under Yosemite, perhaps evaluation of my patch could be given a higher priority? If it would help I can provide updated files which are drop-in replacements for the current R trunk.

Cheers,

Colin