R devel - Jul 1999 - Gnome interface status report

Hi,

The Gnome version now compiles, and it should also be working (at least as much
as it
ever has).  I've changed Makefile.in to the new system, which is very cool. 
What I
want to work on now is:

- Graphics.  I want to move to the Gnome canvas for this, which should be
reasonably
  easy.  This will give us rotated text (which I never got going properly
before) and
  the option for antialiased graphics.  However, there are some unimplemented
bits in
  the canvas (and the antialiasing is currently a bit buggy), so this may take a
while
  to get going properly.

- Printing.  This will hopefully include chucking text (like the console and
help
  pages) to the print spooler, and somehow making graphics windows spit out PS
files.
  If the Gnome print architecture ever gets finished, we will be able to do
really
  cool printing stuff, but that might be a while.

- Preferences.  I need to add a few more things, and make some of the existing
prefs
  actually do something.  Some of this will be easier once Brian Ripley's
stuff to do
  with the command line parameters is finished, I think.

- Syntax highlighting.  Someone has written a widget that can do syntax
highlighting,
  so I would like to base the R console on it.  This could take a bit of work,
but
  would look fantastic.

I've decided to use Glade (http://glade.pn.org) for laying out the dialog
boxes from
now on.  This will mean fixing a couple of things in Glade, and including
libglade in
the R source (this will only affect the gnome part of the source, of course). 
The
time savings from using Glade are incredible; writing the GUI code in C was
horrible.

Lyndon
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Hi,

First, the Find dialog now works.  Users can search backwards or forwards, from
the top,
bottom or current cursor position.  Tomorrow I'm going to add regular
expression searches
and the option to wrap searches.

I have also got command line arguments working.  I'd really like someone to
test this out,
as I never use the command line arguments and so don't know what people
generally use.

I have added support for the R_NSIZE, R_VSIZE, R_HISTFILE, and R_HISTSIZE
environment
variables (cut'n'paste from unix/system.c :-).  If there are any other
environment
variables lurking in the unix source code that I should know about, please let
me know.

Given that things like NSize and VSize can be set via environment variable,
command line
argument and GUI preferences, I have arbitrarily come up with a precedence
(it's easy to
change if anyone disagrees).  Command line arguments have the highest
precedence,
followed by the GUI prefs, followed by the environment variables.  Arguably the 
environment variables should take precedence over the GUI preferences; but I
think that
it could be a bit confusing if a user sets the vsize using the preferences
dialog, but
the setting never takes effect because of an environment variable in the system
profile.
However, the GUI will use any environment variables as the default when creating
the
preferences.

I have also split gnome/system.c into several files, because it was becoming to
big for
easy navigation.  The files are: system.c, system-unix.c, system-choosefile.c,
system-console.c, and system-showfiles.c.  system.c has main, the argument
parsing and
the cleanup stuff.  system-unix.c has all the code that I haven't touched,
i.e. that is
(hopefully) identical to the corresponding functions in unix/system.c.

Lyndon

PS: I broke the Gnome graphics today, which is wierd because I didn't touch
them.  I'll
figure it out tomorrow.  I've also noticed that several console control keys
no longer
work (C-u in particular), which I will need to sort out.

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