RKWard 0.5.6 - Assorted new features and fixes

Monday, 30 May 2011

Sometimes, it is not easy to summarize the changes that happened in only a bit over two month of development. Besides the usual bug-fixes, RKWard 0.5.6 (download) brings many small improvements all over the place. For users working with many different windows, the new Ctrl+Tab window switching feature will be of particular interest. R experts will appreciate that S4 slots and package namespaces can now be explored in the workspace browser. The output window can now also be used, easily, to document snippets of R code (including syntax highlighting) and the corresponding R output.

For more detail, read on, below, and most importantly, be sure to give the new version of RKWard a try. Remember: Your feedback is important!

The changes in detail:

  • New features and improvements
    • Add simple man page for command line options
    • Replace the R console's "Copy selection cleaned" action with "Copy commands, only", which will omit any non-command regions in the copy
    • Add "Copy lines to output" action to copy highlighted lines from the R console or script editors to the output window
    • R commands and their output can be "carbon copied" to the output window
    • On Windows, RKWard will detect, and offer to disable "native" file system dialogs
    • Object browsers that show only the global environment now hide the ".GlobalEnv" item
    • Added function rk.print.code() to write highlighted R code to the output window
    • Box plot plugin gains support for grouped outcome data
    • Crosstabs N to 1 plugin gains options to compute proportions and margins (thanks to Andrés Necochea)
    • Added convenience R function rk.list() to allow simplification of plugin code
    • Added stack-based window switching using Ctrl+(Shift)+Tab; this replaces the old "Next Window" and "Previous Window" actions
    • Provide a template for bug reports, containing standardized information on the RKWard setup in Help->Report Bug...
    • When loading a (local) workspace, change the working directory to the directory of the workspace (configurable)
    • Include the sidebar position of tool windows when saving / restoring the workplace layout
    • "Pending jobs" tool window is not longer shown in the bottom sidebar by default
    • Support removing individual tool windows from the sidebars, completely
    • Add an action to interrupt all (current and pending) commands
    • File browser context menu gains many more KDE standard actions (KDE 4.3 and above, only)
    • Auxiliary binaries rkward.bin and rkward.rbackend are no longer installed into /usr[/local]/bin/ on Unix
    • Support function argument hinting for R primitives
    • Support package namespaces in object name completion and workspace browser
    • Support S4 slots in object name completion and workspace browser
    • Support plot history for ggplot2 plots
    • Be less pro-active about fetching structure information on R objects in the workspace
    • Allow to browse arbitrarily deeply nested environments in the object browser
  • Bugfixes
    • Fixed: Would crash when searching for a term with quotes in the help search window
    • Fixed: Potential crash when creating plots from a tcl/tk based GUI
    • Fix compilation on FreeBSD
    • Fixed: Function argument hints would not be shown in some corner cases
    • Fixed: Pressing Ctrl+C would not reset syntactically incomplete commands in the R console
    • Fixed: Graphics device windows would disappear when trying to attach them to the main window with some versions of Qt
    • Fixed: tcl/tk widgets would lock up after running commands in the R Console
    • Fixed: When saving the workplace while closing the session, the workplace layout would not always be saved correctly
    • Fixed: Object name completion would abort early in the script editor with KDE 4.4
    • More correct handling of quotes in object name completion