Plot zoom and locator in RStudio

Question

Is there a way to enable locator() functionality in the RStudio plot zoom? This only works in the smaller window (default bottom right) of RStudio but when you click on a viewer already open as a separate window, no coordinates are captured:

plot(iris$Petal.Width, iris$Petal.Length)
locator()

Perhaps the answer here is that is not currently implemented and that is why I couldn't find mention of it online.

I'm using RStudio version 0.99.491.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This does not directly use RStudio's "Zoom" function, but gets pretty close at what you're probably after:

df <- data.frame(1:4)
windows()
plot(df)
locator(1)

A couple of notes:

1. You can't dynamically resize the window. If you want to zoom in, you first need to call windows(), then resize the window, then execute plot(df).
2. Be careful to specify the n argument for locator(). Otherwise it will crash your R session because of this bug. (Which hasn't been resolved AFAIK)

But if your purpose is to be able to use locator() on a zoomed version of a plot (i.e. if you have a very crowded plot), this should do the trick.