Showing posts with label tcltk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tcltk. Show all posts

GrapheR: A GUI for base graphics in R

How did I miss the GrapheR package?

The author, Maxime Hervé, published an article about the package [1] in the same issue of the R Journal as we did on googleVis. Yet, it took me a package update notification on CRANbeeries to look into GrapheR in more detail - 3 years later! And what a wonderful gem GrapheR is.

The package provides a graphical user interface for creating base charts in R. It is ideal for beginners in R, as the user interface is very clear and the code is written along side into a text file, allowing users to recreate the charts directly in the console.

Adding and changing legends? Messing around with the plotting window settings? It is much easier/quicker with this GUI than reading the help file and trying to understand the various parameters.

Here is a little example using the iris data set.
library(GrapheR)
data(iris)
run.GrapheR()
This will bring up a window that helps me to create the chart and tweak the various parameters.

Simple user interface in R to get login details

Occasionally I have to connect to services from R that ask for login details, such as databases. I don't like to store my login details in the R source code file, instead I would prefer to enter the my login details when I execute the code.


Fortunately, I found some old code in a post by Barry Rowlingson that does just that. It uses the tcltk package in R to create a little window in which the user can enter her details, without showing the password. The tcltk package is part of base R, which means the code will run on any operating system. Nice!