[R] RGui: windows-record and command history

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 3/23/2006 10:29 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> On 3/23/06, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
>> On 3/23/2006 7:35 AM, Thomas Steiner wrote:
>> > a) How can I set the recording of all windows()-history forever to
>> > "true"? I want something like windows(record = TRUE) but not just for
>> > the window that opens then, but for all windows I will open ever.
>>
>> options(graphics.record=TRUE)
>>
>> will make that happen for the rest of the session.  To really make it
>> happen forever, you need to put this line in your Rprofile (see
>> ?Rprofile for where that comes from).
>>
>> Watch out though:  the graphics history is stored in your current
>> workspace in memory, and it can get big.  You might find you're running
>> out of memory if you store everything, and you'll find your .RData files
>> quite large if you save your workspace.
>>
>> On my todo list (but not for 2.3.0) is the possibility of setting a
>> default history length, perhaps defaulting to saving the last 2 or 3
>> pages.
> 
> Would it be feasible to have history on disk or perhaps the last
> m in memory and the last n (possibly Inf) on disk?

The history is just another R object.  Saving big R objects on disk 
might be desirable, but it would be a big change, so I'd call it 
infeasible.  I wouldn't want to get into special-casing this particular 
R object:  that way lies madness.

However, since it is just an R object, it's available for R code to work 
with, so someone who was interested in doing this could write a 
contributed package that did it.

> Is your todo list published anywhere?

No, it's too embarrassing how long some things have been sitting on it.

Duncan Murdoch