[R] R on Mac PRO does anyone have experience with R on such a platform ?

[Charilaos Skiadas]

JiHO, in case you are not following TextMate's mailing list, you  
might want to check out Hans-Jorg Bibiko's work on Rdaemon:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.editors.textmate.general/24195/

It provides a lot of the terminal functionality within a TextMate  
window, uses X11 for the plots, and opens help files either in a  
browser or in a TextMate HTML window. It essentially runs an R  
process in the background, and communicates with it, so I'm not sure  
it would allow you to run R on a remote server. But I think it is  
worth checking out otherwise. Currently you have to install the  
bundles from the above link, but I'm hoping soon we'll be able to  
commit these bundles to TextMate's bundle repository.

Anyone interested in trying it out and having problems, you can email  
TextMate's mailing list (http://macromates.com/community), which both  
I and Hans-Jorg follow closely.

Haris Skiadas
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Hanover College

PS: Yes, it is the best $40 I've ever spent, by far.

On Feb 11, 2008, at 2:08 PM, jiho wrote:

> 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/