[Rd] RAqua and AquaTclTk

[Peter Dalgaard]

Stefano Iacus <jago at mclink.it> writes:

> While playing around with panther I discovered (with surprise) that
> tcltk seems to work (even if not smoothly) with RAqua without first
> calling tkStartGUI.
> 
> I switched back to 10.2.6 and it works as well.
> I think this is due to the "last minute" fix in RAqua now using idle
> timers because of too much cpu usage.
> 
> Some "mouse" trick is needed though. If you want to test it you can
> just try
> 
> library(tcltk)
> demo(tkdensity)
> 
> press return and wait for quartz device to show the density plot.
> Then to interact with the widgets just click outside R (everywhere but
> not windows related to R) and click on the tk-window to activate it.
> Now you can interact with the widgets for "some time", which means
> that after a while you loose the control and you need to re-do the
> trick (click outside R and reactivate the tk window).
> 
> BTW, doing this (which is far from being even suboptimal) you loose
> RAqua menus.
> 
> I think RAqua menus should be reestablished if I force the redrawing
> after every activation of the RAqua Console window.
> The other problem (loose of control of tk window) seems to come from
> the bliking cursor on the RAqua Console.
> 
> I'll try to change/fix the last two points in R-patched and update you
> on this history.
> 
> Of course if you have other ideas in the meanwhile let me know.

Stefano, 

I'm not sure I understand the code, but it seems that you're running 
OtherEventLoops in a separate "thread" (or timer)? 

InstallEventLoopTimer(GetMainEventLoop(), 0,
kEventDurationMillisecond*10, NewEventLoopTimerUPP(OtherEventLoops),
NULL, &Inst_OtherEventLoops); 

and it is OtherEventLoops that does 

R_runHandlers(R_InputHandlers, R_checkActivity(0, 1));

If Tcl is among the R_InputHandlers, I think you might want to do this
*only* when idle, to avoid getting a callback interfering with an
executing Tcl command. I.e. perhaps get rid of OtherEventLoops and
move content into RIdleTimer?

Another thing that I suspect you're not handling properly is the
recursive event loop: If you do something like tkwait.variable("foo")
then the tcltk main loop takes over and you need to register an Aqua
event handler for it. Can this be done?

Again, I have zero documentation on how Aqua works and no machine
where it runs, so I could be talking complete rubbish here...

        -p

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907