Dear R-devel: Would R core team consider endorsing a graphical toolkit and trying to facilitate development of little GUI tools?
I need a gui matrix editor for users that want to be able to write matrices that are later used to simulate data. Instead of teaching them to write a covariance matrix (for example, for mvtnorm), I want to tell them run a function that pops up a table they can fill in. The users need to be able to enter variable names in the matrix, so something that would accept a 0 0 0 b 0 c d e would be great. Something that would accept formulae like this would be even more great. a 0 0 0 b a^2 c d e I want this gui matrix editor to "just work" on Windows, Mac, Linux. I don't mind building this on top of some widget set, but it is important that the widget set be easily installable on the user end. That's why I wish R core would offer us some guidance or advice. I'm not a programmer, but I can learn to program with a library, as long as it is not a waste of time. I've been searching R archives and here's what I found so far. 1. tcl/tk Building on R tcltk2, for people that have the Tcl addon widget TkTable installed, there are several packages. in tcltk2 itself, there is a function tk2edit, and there are others that try to embellish. I've tried several of these, they seem to be not-quite done yet, one can't copy a rectangle, for example. But maybe I could learn how to fix them up and make yet another tktable based editor. Problem: requires user to have enough understanding to install the Tcl widget TkTable. And, for platforms like Windows, user has to install tcl/tk itself. On Linux and Mac, that is not as big of a hurdle, so far as I can tell. On Debian linux, I found that in a package libtktable that works, but I have no idea how tough that would be on other linux systems or Macintosh or Windows. Another problem is that tcl/tk editions change rapidly, and on several of our systems, we still don't have access to tcl/tk 8.5 (RedHat/Centos based clusters still running version 5 are like that). 2. Gtk Building on Rgtk, I found the package RGtk2Extras. This of course requires a function gtk tool chain, which used to be a big problem on the various platforms. But the function dfedit appears to be almost exactly what I'm looking for. I can create a character matrix and put in letters how I want, but I later face the problem of how to evaluate the matrix. Problem: even more than tcl/tk, GTK versions change and become incompatible, especially across platforms. What about QT or WX-Widgets. I gather RkWard is built on KDE, and hence Qt. I don't find matrix editors using those languages, but I don't know why not. Maybe this is impossible for R core to advise us because you may disagree on which widget library is best, but if there is some consensus, I would be glad to know because I would do whatever you recommend. I'm pretty sure that, if you said, "use library X, version XYZ", then the worldwide usage of R is sufficiently broad that people would step forward and help make sure those libraries are packaged for all OS. I mean, if there were no tktable package for any linux for which I make packages (RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu), I would create the packages. But I'm not doing it now because I have no reason to believe that is a good path from here on out. -- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 University of Kansas ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
