There's been requests in the past for a text editor built into the Rgui for Windows, from which code can be submitted to the R console. Something along the lines of the script editor in S-Plus. Currently Rgui can only display a file read-only in a pager. As far as I can tell there's been little motivation to implement an editor, as most developers use (the excellent) ESS, or don't use Windows. I also use ESS, but the students here are taught S-Plus and learn to use the .ssc editor. I think it would be a good selling point if the equivalent existed for R, without the need to use an external editor (or a hack in Tcl/Tk).
So I'd like to write one and contribute it. I've had a quick mess with the code, and I've now got a partially usable editor working. Before I go any further and implement it fully, I just wanted to ask whether this is a desirable thing for R. In case there are long-term plans to scrap and rewrite the whole Rgui code base... Any gotchas, dos or don'ts for writing this? I suppose we'd want something like a new R function file.edit to open the file for editing, analogously to file.show which opens a text file read-only. Currently edit() can be used to invoke an editor, but that seems to be designed to work on objects rather than files.
Chris
-- Christopher Jackson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Research Associate, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Imperial College School of Medicine, Norfolk Place, London W2 1PG, tel. 020 759 43371
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