Make R Studio plots only show up in new window - r

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 plot a graph, the other panes automatically pop out of the side bar to show me the Plot pane. Because I work on a laptop, this makes everything too small to see. By clicking the Zoom button on the Plots pane, I can get the plot also show up in a new window, but does not prevent the Plots pane from showing up.
Is there a way to "disable" the Plots pane in R Studio, and force plots show up in a new window?
> sessionInfo()
R version 3.2.3 (2015-12-10)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 7 x64 (build 7601) Service Pack 1
locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252
attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils
[5] datasets methods base
other attached packages:
[1] ggplot2_2.2.1 jsonlite_1.4
[3] data.table_1.10.4
loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] labeling_0.3 colorspace_1.2-6
[3] scales_0.4.1 lazyeval_0.2.0
[5] plyr_1.8.4 tools_3.2.3
[7] gtable_0.1.2 tibble_1.3.0
[9] curl_2.5 Rcpp_0.12.10
[11] grid_3.2.3 munsell_0.4.2
>

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

Commenting the following lines in C:\Program Files\RStudio\R\Tools.R seems to work (it may be necessary to edit the file as administrator):
# 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()
})

Answer 5

If you want all plots in the current script to appear on a separate window, this should do the job:
dev.new(noRStudioGD = TRUE)
*Tested on RStudio version 1.4.1106 for Windows with R version 4.0.5 (2021-03-31)
For a 'permanent' solution, the answer by Rubén Fernández-Casal should work well.

Answer 6

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.