Using R for Introductory Statistics : John Verzani

Appendix BGraphical user interfaces and RR, unlike many commercial offerings, lacks a common graphical user interface (GUI).The reasons for this are many, but primarily, the multi-platform nature of R makedevelopment difficult, as does the fact that most “power users” of R (the likelydevelopers of a GUI) prefer the flexibility and power of typing-centric methods.However, there are a number of GUI components available. We try only to cover theGUIs for Windows and Mac OS X, and the GUI provided by the addon package RCmdr.For details about additional GUI components, including the promising SciViews-R andJGR projects, consult the RGui page linked to on the home page of R (http://www.rproject.org/).B.1 The Windows GUIThere are two ways to run R under Windows: from the shell or from within its GUI. TheRgui . exe provides the GUI and is the one that is associated with the R icon on thedesktop. When the icon is double-clicked, the Windows GUI starts. It consists of a fewbasic elements: a window with a menu bar and a container to hold windows for theconsole (the command line), help pages, and figures. (This describes the default multidocumentinterface (MDI). An option for a singledocument interface (SDI) may be setunder the File: : Options…menu.)The initial RGui window looks something like Figure B.1. The window after making aplot and consulting the help pages looks like Figure B.2.The workings of the GUI are similar to many other Windows applications. Weselectively describe a few of them.