Setting default device in R in Mac OS X —08 February 2013

On Mac OS X, for some reason the default device for displaying plots is Quartz. This can be inconvenient, since for example the savePlot function works only with X11 devices with Cairo support.

To change the default device, I created ~/.Rprofile like this:

`setHook(packageEvent("grDevices", "onLoad"),
    function(...) grDevices::X11.options(type='cairo'))
options(device='x11')
`

The setHook creates a hook so that when the grDevices module is loaded, it sets the default type of X11 devices to cairo.

The second line sets the default device to X11.

Both of these lines are necessary, otherwise the default device would either not be X11, or it would not be the correct X11 type.