RKWard 0.7.0 - Split views, based on KF5

Monday, 16 April 2018

It took much longer than we had hoped for, but today, we proudly announce that version 0.7.0 of RKWard is available for download. This is the first release of RKWard to be based on KF5 (version 5 of the KDE libraries), which means RKWard can again profit from the ongoing development of an actively supported platform. However, not all changes are behind the curtains. The most prominent addition in this release is "split view" functionality, which allows you to partition the main window for viewing your scripts or data side-by-side. Beyond that a number of bugs were fixed, and we polished our installers for Windows and Mac.

Update: Translations were missing from installations of 0.7.0. This problem has been addressed in version 0.7.0b of RKWard.

As usual, please don't hesitate to contact us with your feedback, suggestions, and contributions!

The changes in detail:

  • New features and improvements

    • Implement "split view" feature, allowing to partion the main window, and to hvae several views of the same files / data side-by-side
    • Double click on object in Workspace browser tries to open reference page, not object viewer, if the object is outside of .GlobalEnv
    • Limit the number of debug log-files to keep (at most three, each, for frontend and backend)
    • Remove Windows-only UI for setInternet2()-option (no longer available in R, with setInternet2(TRUE) the default since R 3.2.2)
    • Remove startup wrapper script (moving the still-needed functionality into the main executable)
    • Preview status messages can now be closed
    • Show the message accompanying rk.show.files() or rk.edit.files() inside the main window, instead of a separate dialog
    • File browser gains "Rename" context menu action
    • File selection fields in plugin dialogs remember the last used directory (per session), and check for a valid selection

  • Bug fixes

    • Fix crash with R 3.5.x due to use to STRING_PTR
    • Fixed: Creating trellis on-screen plots, while package lattice is not on the search path would produce errors in plot history mechanism
    • Function argument hinting is less easily fooled by braces inside quotes
    • Better handling of text drag-and-drop inside the R console window
    • Fix NAs introduced by editing data containing characters that cannot be encoded in the system locale
    • Fixed: Preview boxes followed by a element would not work under some circumstances
    • Fixed: Setting an output CSS file via the GUI did not work
    • Fixed: Bug report feature on Windows did nothing
    • Avoid some potential encoding issues, that could cause graphical select.list to fail for certain strings, under some circumstances