R devel - Oct 2003 - RAqua and AquaTclTk

While playing around with panther I discovered (with surprise) that 
tcltk seems to work (even if not smoothly) with RAqua without first 
calling tkStartGUI.

I switched back to 10.2.6 and it works as well.
I think this is due to the "last minute" fix in RAqua now using idle 
timers because of too much cpu usage.

Some "mouse" trick is needed though. If you want to test it you can 
just try

library(tcltk)
demo(tkdensity)

press return and wait for quartz device to show the density plot.
Then to interact with the widgets just click outside R (everywhere but 
not windows related to R) and click on the tk-window to activate it. 
Now you can interact with the widgets for "some time", which means
that
after a while you loose the control and you need to re-do the trick 
(click outside R and reactivate the tk window).

BTW, doing this (which is far from being even suboptimal) you loose 
RAqua menus.

I think RAqua menus should be reestablished if I force the redrawing 
after every activation of the RAqua Console window.
The other problem (loose of control of tk window) seems to come from 
the bliking cursor on the RAqua Console.

I'll try to change/fix the last two points in R-patched and update you 
on this history.

Of course if you have other ideas in the meanwhile let me know.


stefano

Stefano Iacus <jago@mclink.it> writes:
> While playing around with panther I discovered (with surprise) that
> tcltk seems to work (even if not smoothly) with RAqua without first
> calling tkStartGUI.
> 
> I switched back to 10.2.6 and it works as well.
> I think this is due to the "last minute" fix in RAqua now using
idle
> timers because of too much cpu usage.
> 
> Some "mouse" trick is needed though. If you want to test it you
can
> just try
> 
> library(tcltk)
> demo(tkdensity)
> 
> press return and wait for quartz device to show the density plot.
> Then to interact with the widgets just click outside R (everywhere but
> not windows related to R) and click on the tk-window to activate it.
> Now you can interact with the widgets for "some time", which
means
> that after a while you loose the control and you need to re-do the
> trick (click outside R and reactivate the tk window).
> 
> BTW, doing this (which is far from being even suboptimal) you loose
> RAqua menus.
> 
> I think RAqua menus should be reestablished if I force the redrawing
> after every activation of the RAqua Console window.
> The other problem (loose of control of tk window) seems to come from
> the bliking cursor on the RAqua Console.
> 
> I'll try to change/fix the last two points in R-patched and update you
> on this history.
> 
> Of course if you have other ideas in the meanwhile let me know.
Stefano, 

I'm not sure I understand the code, but it seems that you're running 
OtherEventLoops in a separate "thread" (or timer)? 

InstallEventLoopTimer(GetMainEventLoop(), 0,
kEventDurationMillisecond*10, NewEventLoopTimerUPP(OtherEventLoops),
NULL, &Inst_OtherEventLoops); 

and it is OtherEventLoops that does 

R_runHandlers(R_InputHandlers, R_checkActivity(0, 1));

If Tcl is among the R_InputHandlers, I think you might want to do this
*only* when idle, to avoid getting a callback interfering with an
executing Tcl command. I.e. perhaps get rid of OtherEventLoops and
move content into RIdleTimer?

Another thing that I suspect you're not handling properly is the
recursive event loop: If you do something like tkwait.variable("foo")
then the tcltk main loop takes over and you need to register an Aqua
event handler for it. Can this be done?

Again, I have zero documentation on how Aqua works and no machine
where it runs, so I could be talking complete rubbish here...

        -p

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard@biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907