[R-SIG-Mac] xquartz hanging

[biii+rsigm@c m@iii@g oii 8p@wexpress@com]

Are there easy fixes or alternatives to using XQuartz for R plots?

I’m running R-4.4.3 (emacs/ess) on macos 15.4.1 and have xquartz-2.8.5 
installed. Most of the time plotting in R works well enough (I tend to 
use ggplot2, I don’t know if it happens as often with base plots). 
Occasionally (several times a week), “something” happens with the plot 
window, and from then on that R process can no longer plot anything 
more. The “something” is not well defined for me yet, I think it’s a 
mouse-wheel or mouse-click or similar; the snark in me says “well don’t 
do that”, but I cannot nail down exactly how/when it breaks, it just does.

When it happens, the current device window is still open, but it has a 
mac spinning-colorwheel, no new plotting commands work, and I cannot 
close the window myself. I cannot dev.off() it, nor does dev.new() give 
me a new plotting window. When this happens for a particular R process, 
my only options for plotting are either (a) close the R process and 
start over, or (b) manually plot to a PDF or similar one-shot graphics 
device, viewing in a different app.

There are several related issues I can find:

https://github.com/XQuartz/XQuartz/issues/431, specific to macos 15.4 or 
newer I think; some mention of “minimizing windows” but I don’t minimize 
my plot windows, so perhaps not that
https://github.com/XQuartz/XQuartz/issues/168, closed as “not planned”, 
though this one is much older than the first (431) issue

I’ve tried using something like |httpgd| 
<https://github.com/nx10/httpgd/> since it can (mostly) provide an 
“always updating graphics device” for example without xquartz. 
Unfortunately, with some other packages (namely plumber that I use 
frequently-enough) it can put the R’s REPL into an unbreakable state 
(#215 <https://github.com/nx10/httpgd/issues/215>). If that were fixed 
I’d be a lot more comfortable using that as my workaround.

My research has not shown any other options for fixing or replacing 
xquartz with a more stable solution. Are there good ways to troubleshoot 
and try to fix the xquartz issue? Does anybody else have a workaround or 
alternative that is less unwieldy than pdf(..); plot(..); dev.off()?

Thanks,
Bill

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