RKWard 0.3.5 is out

Saturday, 16 April 2016 Tfry

Finally a new release of rkward is available for download. The focus of this new release has been on reworking the code responsible for dealing with plugins, and on fixing many small bugs. However, also a number of new features/improvements have been done since the last release. Most noteably, there are new plugins for Histograms and Boxplots, and for many distribution functions. A mostly complete list of changes:

  • Bug fixes:
    • give back focus to the script editor after running line/selection/all
    • clean up R temporary files on shutdown
    • fix crash with objects with quotes in their names
    • avoid leftover PHP processes if rkward crashes or gets killed
    • code display (for plugins) gets updated reliably
    • handle non-existing and non-local URLs
    • use a shell wrapper around rkward to do some setup just like R. This should fix a number of minor quirks (links) in help window
    • update tab caption for command editor if filename changes (i.e. saved as)
    • keep main window caption up to date
    • fix status bar
    • in trailing rows/columns of the data.frame editor, change background color, when selected
    • explicitely set LC_NUMERIC to "C" at startup. R does not work correctly with other settings of LC_NUMERIC
  • New features:
    • added syntax highlighting in the console
    • show info message, if retrieving context help fails
    • pressing Ctrl+C in the console resets a partial command, if any
    • backspace or del clear cells in data.frame editor
    • when switching between dialog and wizard interfaces, GUI settings are copied
    • add options to show help-search and R help index to Help menu
    • many new plugins by Stefan Roediger
    • indicate if a document in a command editor is modified (unsaved)
  • Compilation / installation:
    • configure: if not overriden, and $KDEDIR is not set, assume --prefix=`kde-config --prefix` instead of /usr/local/kde/
    • autodetection of R_HOME and related variables during configure
    • configure: use single configure option for location of R_HOME, and add check for libR.so
    • most of the time you will no longer need to specify options for ./configure
  • User Interface improvements:
    • reworded exit dialog box
    • remove some GUI clutter for Script File editor
    • rename "Command File" to "Script File"
    • rename "Command Stack" window to "Pending Jobs"
    • reworked factor levels editor
  • Assorted:
    • complete rework of plugins code
    • plugins can embed other plugins
    • yet more code cleanups

Please give the new release a try, and send your feedback to the mailing list.

Important Note: If you see the message "Error: C stack usage is too close to the limit" on the console, this is due to a small but grave bug in R. This bug is present only in a few pre-release packages of R 2.3.0, but some of those are floating right now. If you encounter this bug, you will have to either downgrade your version of R, or wait until fixed packages are available for your distribution. If in doubt what to do, ask us for advice on the mailing list.