[R] [macosx] improving quartz & Aqua Tk behaviour outside of RGui

[René J.V. Bertin]

Hello,

On Mac OS X, certain Aqua/Quartz UI functionality requires an
application to be launched from within an app bundle, or
(alternatively) requires a Carbon application with a resource fork.

Playing with the wxWidgets distribution, I discovered that it is quite
easy and transparent to make such a Carbon app from (I guess) any
command line application. When applied to the R executable called from
the command line
(/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/bin/exec/R), this indeed
improves the behaviour of Quartz graphics windows, and of dialogs made
with TclTk (Aqua version 8.4), which for me now behave like under X11.
(i.e. as if controlled by a separate thread while the prompt remains
usable.)

I've created a small, standalone, shell script that does the necessary
work, based on code and files from the wxWidgets distribution:

mkApp /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/bin/exec/R

does the trick. The script can be downloaded from

http://rjvbertin.free.fr/Programmes/mkApp.tar.gz

Hope this helps (and isn't too old news...)

R.B.