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

[jiho]

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/