[R] X-window graphics -- preventing window coming to front?

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 6:03 PM, Steve Jaffe<sjaffe at riskspan.com> wrote:
>
> When I do dev.new(), the  resulting window comes to the front and grabs the
> focus. Is there a way to prevent this so I can continue working in other
> windows while the graphics are being produced?

 That's a function of your window manager, not R. It can be possible
to pass window manager "hints" from an application to a window
manager, but your window manager is free to ignore them.

 For example, if I do:

 xcalc -iconic

 on the (Unix, not R) command line of my Ubuntu Hardy box with
Gnome/Compiz window management, the calculator pops up like normal.
But if I do it on a box running the xfwm4 window manager, it starts
iconified. Gnome/Compiz ignores the hint.

 The Compiz configuration however has a multitude of configuration
options controlling how windows appear. It may be possible to set it
up so that all X-windows graphics produced by R start iconified, or
don't get the focus or whatever. I'm not going to dive into my Compiz
config now (System... Preferences.. Advanced Desktop Effects Settings)
to find out since you might be using a different system altogether -
KDE, or twm, or something.

Barry