David, Many thanks for your helpful comments.
I am still struggling to get consistent behavior from the Mac. For myself I think I will stick to R in the terminal as that works more or less platform independently. For my students, I will just warn them not to expect the R.app to work at all like the RGui which I demo. Since I do not really know which differences are features and which are likely to alter, I don't think it worth my while reseaching and teaching many details. The cut and paste problem: I have a habit of wanting to alter and rerun just one line of a pasted block. But that's probably just what has been convenient for me up to now. As for libraries, I don't even know what a framework tree is yet. I will have to find out... Regards, Ruth On Wed, 24 Mar 2010, David Winsemius wrote: > > On Mar 7, 2010, at 5:29 PM, Ruth M. Ripley wrote: > > > I have just begun to use a Mac after teaching R (with my students > > officially Windows users) for a while. It seems that the gui works > > differently from that on Windows. In particular, I quote from Simon on > > r-sig-mac > > > > "this [q()] was never intended to work in the GUI because it entirely > > bypasses the app quitting mechanism. You should never use q/quit in > > the GUI unless you > > really mean to exit R right away and discard everything (history, > > all open > > files, ...)" > > > > Please can you point me to some documentation that explains this and > > any > > other similar traps for the unwary fairly knowledgeable R user. My > > audience are very naive Mac users, e.g. they cannot possibly find > > hidden > > files as they do not know what a terminal is. > > I happen to think the use of Terminal.app is a basic skill needed by > all users. I have move it to the Dock. (I have been a Mac user on and > off for decades.) > > The other problem (which is not unlike some similar problems faced by > Windows users) is the "hidden" status of .Rprofile under the default > settings of Finder.app. I have gone with globally unhiding the dot- > files in Finder.app, although that may not be wise for total newbies. > > There is a Mac section of the Installation Manual and an R-Mac FAQ: > > http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/RMacOSX-FAQ.html > > (It looks somewhat out of data, unfortunately. And it could use some > revisions since the 4.5.3 entry is intended to be the Edit menu > section. The menu items have slightly different names, and on my > machine there is no Bioconductor menu item (although there is one in a > pulldown box inside a dialog). I did not see a Window menu item > description, and that is the menu I use most often.) > > > > I would like to be able to > > help them but am struggling myself. e.g. They may know what the > > switch on > > the toolbar means, but I do not. > > Mousing over GUI tool bar buttons brings up a brief description on my > machine. > > > I certainly would not guess that a button > > with a tooltip Quit R would not do the same as q(). > > > > I also maintain an R package in which I work very hard to make > > everything > > platform independent. Is the Mac a special case? It is hard to quit R > > without an option to save on either Linux or Windows. > > There are some who will undoubtedly tell you to stop using the GUI, > but I am a committed Mac-R-GUI user. > > > > > Other differences I have noted are 1) I cannot search in the help > > pages > > and > > That is a minor annoyance. I will either search out the same page with > RSiteSearch() and search with my web-browser, or select, copy, paste > to a Textedit.app window > > > 2) when I copy and paste from an example in a help page I have to do > > it line by line or I cannot adjust it line by line. > > a) I don't understand. I often copy-paste multiple lines from help > pages, and edit before committing the changes with a <return>. You > can edit on multiple lines on the console. Sometimes I need to add an > extra command and then using ";" is needed to act as a command > separator. I have on occasion had problems with help page examples not > pasting correctly that were solved by using example(), > > b) Copy, open R editing window, paste. > > > Workarounds for either > > would be very much appreciated. > > Graphics devices are different. Use capabilities() to see the > available devices. The default graphic device is quartz() (not Quartz) > and saving files from the GUI defaults (with no options) to pdf(). I > generally want tiff versions and I use Preview.app to open the pdf > files and save as tiff. (Yes, I know that I could make tiffs from the > R environment directly.) > > One gotcha is that the Quartz menu item does not shift focus to the > graphics window. I cannot tell you how many times I tried that before > finally learning that I need to use the choice off the Window menu. > And I now never use that menu since I have learned to use all the > corresponding keystrokes > > I have not yet figured out how to fix my broken R connection with my > Symbol font. > > Figuring out how to keep all my packages in the R.Framework tree was a > challenge, since I had managed to add the User/Library tree with the > Installer. If you have done that you can consolidate by dragging the > User/Library copies to the correct position in the R.Framework tree > and using .libPaths() to remove the extra location. > > Sometimes linking out to pdf files from help pages will hang R. I try > to remember not to do that. The "Help topics matching ___" window > opened by "??" will sometimes get itself tied up in knots and fail to > open any selected help pages. Saving and restarting R is the only > action I have been able to get to succeed in that situation. > > > > Thanks, > > > > Ruth > > -- > > Ruth M. Ripley, Email:r...@stats.ox.ac.uk > > Dept. of Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ruth/ > > University of Oxford, Tel: 01865 282851 > > 1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: 01865 272595 > > > > _______________________________________________ > > R-SIG-Mac mailing list > > R-SIG-Mac@stat.math.ethz.ch > > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac > > David Winsemius, MD > West Hartford, CT > > _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Mac mailing list R-SIG-Mac@stat.math.ethz.ch https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
