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Difference opening applications in Finder and Terminal

M

MatsSkoe

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 28, 2013
64
4
I have a problem opening RStudio in Finder which does not occur when using Terminal with "open /Applications/RStudio.app/".

The origin of the problem is the need of a environment variable RSTUDIO_WHICH_R, which I set in .bash_profile. Somehow opening the application in Finder does not look into .bash_profile. Does anyone know a workaround?
 
How did you install RStudio and the R framework? Setting the environment variable is only necessary when you intend to override the default behaviour. If you installed R correctly, then this should work.
 
MatsSkoe said:
I have a problem opening RStudio in Finder which does not occur when using Terminal with "open /Applications/RStudio.app/".

The origin of the problem is the need of a environment variable RSTUDIO_WHICH_R, which I set in .bash_profile. Somehow opening the application in Finder does not look into .bash_profile. Does anyone know a workaround?
Click to expand...
You could just make a little application launching app with AppleScript; this should work to apply the environment variable, although I don't have an app here to test. Open up AppleScript Editor in your Utilities folder and paste the following in:
Code: 
do shell script "echo open /Applications/RStudio.app | /bin/bash"
Then save the script as an application and you can just double click on that to open Studio.
I don't use RStudio so I can't speak to whether you need to be using it this way.
 
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KALLT said:
How did you install RStudio and the R framework? Setting the environment variable is only necessary when you intend to override the default behaviour. If you installed R correctly, then this should work.
Click to expand...

I installed R with Anaconda (Python) so I can also use R with Jupyter Notebook. I don't want a double installation of R so I use "export RSTUDIO_WHICH_R="/Users/Mats/anaconda/bin/R"" and RStudio works opened from Terminal.
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chrfr said:
You could just make a little application launching app with AppleScript; this should work to apply the environment variable, although I don't have an app here to test. Open up AppleScript Editor in your Utilities folder and paste the following in:
Code: 
do shell script "echo open /Applications/RStudio.app | /bin/bash"
Then save the script as an application and you can just double click on that to open Studio.
I don't use RStudio so I can't speak to whether you need to be using it this way.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the suggestion. However, it does not work i'm afraid. I can always try Automater, I guess...
 
MatsSkoe said:
Thank you for the suggestion. However, it does not work i'm afraid. I can always try Automater, I guess...
Click to expand...
In which way doesn't it work? Does it not open RStudio or does it not open RStudio with the right variable?
 
Have you considered symlinking /usr/local/bin/R to /Users/Mats/anaconda/bin/R?
 
KALLT said:
Have you considered symlinking /usr/local/bin/R to /Users/Mats/anaconda/bin/R?
Click to expand...

Your solution is perfect in it simplicity. I knew of symbolic links but never needed to use them. RStudio does start normally this way, however in the same .bash_profile I specified the locale as
en_US.UTF-8. So I still have to open with Terminal do get normal functionality.
 
Makes sense that the dot files are not read, in that Finder process is a child of launchd, which is owned by root.

Along the lines of KALLT post above, can use launchctl to set environment variables for any GUI (Finder launched) program.

Code: 
launchctl setenv var var_val

Can also add environment variable setting to /etc/launchd-user.conf

Along the lines of Automater, I have an old app I downloaded years ago called "AppFactory". Builds apps out of shell scripts. Don't need the app to accomplish this. Need to create an "app_name.app" folder, Contents folder under that. Under Contents, make a Resources folder and a MacOS folder. In MacOS, create your shell script to set environment variables and launch the app. chmod 775 shell_script_name. Done. Can now double click your homemade app and have everything setup correctly.
 
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