Re: Testing wanted for Gnome R

[Lyndon Drake <lyndon stat auckland ac nz>]

On Thu, Nov 11, 1999 at 07:54:09PM -0500, Elliot Lee wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Nov 1999, Lyndon Drake wrote:
> 
> > The GNOME interface is intended to look nicer and make R easier to use,
> > especially for beginners.
> 
> Wow, maybe I should learn how this works instead of ever bothering with
> gnuplot again. Pretty nice.

It's definitely nicer than gnuplot for most plotting.  Plus you can access
standard basic graphics functionality (lines, points, etc.) as well as the
"normal" plot types.

> > Compiling R is similar to most GNU projects: run configure, followed
> > by make and make install.  To enable the GNOME interface, you will
> > need to supply the --with-gnome argument to configure.  Once R has
> > been built, you will want to run R -g to get the GNOME interface.
> >
> > Feel free to contribute patches, bug reports, or other comments.
> 
> 1. If built --with-gnome, the Gnome interface should be the default, since
> it's so much nicer than the other interface. :-)

Thanks for the suggestion.  Making it look pretty has been made easy by
the huge amount of cool stuff in Gnome, so a big thank you to all the
Gnome libs developers.

Actually, it probably is sensible to assume that people who compile in
Gnome support will want to use it.  It took a while for things to get
stable, as R wasn't designed to know about a GUI, so initially people
didn't really want to have a (more) crash prone interface.

> 2. I think you might want to look into using a ZvtTerm widget instead of
> a GtkText for the console - you would get dingus support, a lot nicer
> display, and automatic handling of all the low-level details that you are
> probably having to do by hand now.

Plus it would be faster, and probably less buggy, and multiline pasting
would be easier...  The main reason for using GtkText was in the hope of
adding syntax highlighting.  I wonder if I could do something similar to
the dingus highlighting, but for syntax highlighting rather than just URL
clicking.  If this is possible, I will probably switch.

-- 
Lyndon Drake                       | Desktop:      http://www.gnome.org
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http://stat.auckland.ac.nz/~lyndon | OS:           http://www.linux.com