Make R Studio plots only show up in new window

Question

When using R Studio, I usually just work with an .R file stacked on top of the Console. I keep the other panes (Environment, History, Files, etc) hidden.

But whenever I

Answer 1

The dev.new() function will open a new plot window, which then becomes the target for all plots.

If you wish to open another window you can run the command a second time to open a second window.

dev.off() will shut down the window (in the order they were opened by default).

You can see how to control multiple graphics devices in the documentation here.

Answer 2

In RStudio, the default graphics device is normally "RStudioGD". You can change that to something else: the normal choices are "windows" on Windows, "quartz" on MacOS, "X11" on Linux. So for example, use

options(device = "quartz")

in your RStudio session on a Mac and you'll get the regular MacOS graphics window.

Answer 3

Try using the windows command before your plot call.

windows();(mpg ~ wt, mtcars)

The plot should pop-up in its own window whilst the pane stays minimized.

Answer 4

You can force RStudio to show plots in the Source window if you use R Markdown. In a Rmd file, plots are shown together with code; it's called an R Markdown notebook. You can set the size of the plots too, in what is called an R code chunk:

```{r fig.height = 2, fig.width = 3}
plot(mpg ~ wt, mtcars)
```

When you run the chunk, the plot is shown below it.

If you want to set the plot size for the whole notebook, set the package option using opts_knit and opts_chunk, for example:

```{r setup} 
library(knitr) 
opts_knit$set(global.par = TRUE) 
opts_chunk$set(fig.width = 4.5, fig.height = 3.5)
```

For more information, see here and here.

Answer 5

Commenting the following lines in "RStudio\R\Tools.R" seems to work...

# set our graphics device as the default and cause it to be created/set
.rs.addFunction( "initGraphicsDevice", function()
{
   # options(device="RStudioGD")
   # grDevices::deviceIsInteractive("RStudioGD")
  grDevices::deviceIsInteractive()
})