On 2008-February-11 , at 19:14 , Roger Day wrote: > My experience with R.app on a MACbook has been mostly very positive. > I like the interface much better than that of Windows-- > with two exceptions. > > a) I use stepping thru code with control-R. It's not as convenient > on Mac- > the code you want to run has to be actually selected; not good > enough just > to be on the line you want. > That slows down code-stepping. > b) saveHistory() doesn't save the history of the current session -- > beware, > I lost some work that way. you have to actually click a button. > c) no resizing graphs post-hoc, > d) saving graphics to a file is inconvenient except for pdf output. > > Some plusses are: > a) better built-in editor (if you're not using ESS), including > delimiter > matching > b) the history pane is nice, > c) the package installer and manager are nicer than on Win, > d) autocompletion with ctrl-period, > e) you can select text on the current or past command line much > easier, > f) attractive interface with lots of cosmetic options. > > I've done some tkrplot work in both (using X11 in OSX) > -- some inconsistencies with placement of widgets show up. > > This is off the top of my head. > Check out the mailing list R-sig-mac for more info.
After using R via R-app (which is indeed very nice to start with) I eventually switched to a combination of TextMate + Terminal + CarbonEL - TextMate[1] is a very powerful editor, well worth the $40 price tag, and has nice goodies for R besides syntax highlighting such as command autocompletion, command templates, plenty of snippets, etc. - I run R in a regular Terminal window. This way I get command line editing and searching through history. In addition it makes it as easy to run R on my local machine that on a remote server (useful to run demanding tasks on a large CPU). I can send code from TextMate to the terminal prompt using AppleScript commands in TextMate[2]. This allows to send selected text _or_ current line directly to the Terminal with just a keystroke. - CarbonEL is a package which allows to plot to a quartz window even from a simple Terminal (quartz is Mac OS X graphics engine). The plots on quartz look gorgeous and going back to X11 would have been a pain. Another similar solution would be to use the Cairo package. All in all, I fond it a very convenient and flexible way to use R. It has the added bonus that the same combination (TM+Terminal) works for anything that can run in a terminal window (MATLAB, Scilab, python etc.). So, even if you don't use only R, you can keep the same habits with a nice editor. I haven't tried Emacs+ESS. I've heard a lot of good things about it but learning Emacs is a task in itself. [1] http://macromates.com/ [2] modification of those http://jo.irisson.free.fr/?p=32 for the built-in Terminal, since Terminal on Leopard finally has tabs JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.