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Journal of Statistical Software 7
editor component, shortcuts for the script editor (Section 3.2) are managed separately via
Settings→Configure Editor→Shortcuts. On most systems, it is also possible to configure
shortcuts by right-clicking on the respective menu item.
The choice of available actions on the toolbar can be configured via Settings→Configure
Toolbars. Further, it is possible to add and remove sets of data manipulation and analysis
features from the GUI, using Settings→Configure RKWard→Plugins.
3.1. Workspace browser and object viewer
The workspace browser (Figure 2B) allows to view and manipulate R objects, similar to a
regular file-system browser. This includes both, user objects (data, functions, environments)
in .GlobalEnv and non-user objects in other environments in the R search path (typically, R
package environments). Objects are shown in a hierarchical tree structure. For instance, an
object of class list can be expanded to show all contained objects by clicking on the + symbol
left of the object name. The basic type of each object is indicated by specific icons
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. Further
information on each object can be seen by hovering the mouse pointer over the respective
icon. A tooltip window will appear, including information such as dimensionality or function
arguments, depending on the type of object. Further, objects inside .GlobalEnv can be
removed, renamed, and edited from the context menu.
Several actions are available from a context menu (after right-clicking on the object names),
depending on the type of object. These allow to search the R help for information on that
object, to open a window with detailed information on the object, to delete, rename or
copy the object to a new symbol name, or to copy it to .GlobalEnv. Further, the context
menu allows to open supported types of objects for editing (see Section 3.4; currently, only
data.frames can be edited, and only while they exist in .GlobalEnv). Selecting View from
the context menu opens a new window in the document area, containing basic information
on the object as well as tabs which show the output of print() and summary() calls.
Literally hundreds or even thousands of objects are present in a typical R session. This can
be overwhelming at first, therefore, the workspace browser has options to show only a certain
subset of objects, e.g., only functions or only data objects, including or excluding hidden
objects (object names starting with a “.”), or showing only the contents of .GlobalEnv as
opposed to all environments in the search path.
An object list similar to the workspace browser (but showing only .GlobalEnv by default) is
also used in several places for the selection of objects to work with, e.g., in an analysis plugin
(see Section 3.5).
3.2. Code editor
RKWard comes with an advanced R script editor, based on the KDE advanced text editor
component (Kate; http://kate-editor.org/). Features of this editor include syntax high-
lighting (both on screen and in printouts; for R and many other script types), code folding,
block-wise indentation adjustments or commenting, automatic brackets, search and replace
with plain text or regular expressions, and many more. Further, Kate can be extended by
customized actions implemented in ECMAScript (Haumann 2010). The editor automatically
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The workspace browser indicates the types “Number”, “Factor”, “String”, and “Logical” for the data.frame
“my.data” (Figure 2B).