gWidgetstcltk
Description
This package provides an implementation of the gWidgets API using the tcltk package. This excellent package allows the R programmer to interface with the tcl/tk libraries.Installation
This package requires the tcltk version 8.5 or newer to work.Linux
8.5 is available, but 8.4 is likely to be installed.Mac OS X
Mac OS X (10.5 anyways) comes with 8.4. To install 8.5 one can a) install the XCode software (which may be standard with the OS) b) download tcl and tk from http://www.tcl.tk c) compile it via the magic configure, make, make install incantation. (It worked for me anyways)Windows
The 8.5 version comes with R as of 2.7.0, so you are good to go.Documentation
The main source for documentation is in the package gWidgets. Differences from that API spelled out there in the help files are documented (hopefully) in the help page for gWidgetstcltk which can be read with
?gWidgetstcltk
The gWidgets API is in need of fine tuning, but for the most
part is spelled out in these pages.
The gWidgets package also has a vignette with many examples. As of version 0.0-29 this is in need of updating, so some examples may not work.
The gWidgets website has several examples available to try out.
Other R packages using gWidgets
The packages FAir, playwith, and pmg use gWidgets. They can be consulted as another source of examples, although all use the RGtk2 version.07/18/2008: gWidgetstcltk needs tcl/tk 8.5
The gWidgetstcltk package now needs tcl/tk version 8.5 or newer
installed. This change was made when R 2.7.0 shipped this version for
windows. The 8.5 version allows for many more widgets, that prior to
this were hacked or ignored in gWidgetstcltk.
For windows this is not issue, for linux users not a big issue, for
Mac OS X users, one needs to (I think) compile the tcl/tk libraries
from source (www.tcl.tk). This has been confirmed to work for
gWidgetstcltk under OS X 10.5, but YMMV.