.Rprofile and Rprofile.site

If Rattle is the primary reason for installing R on your system then you may want to simply start up Rattle every time R starts.

On GNU/Linux a user can add the following lines to the R initialisation file, .Rprofile, in either their home folder or within the folder in which they intend to start up R. The latter file takes precedent if it exists.

library(util)
library(rattle)
rattle()

The util package needs to be explicitly loaded since Rattle needs it, and at the time this initialisation file is loaded, R has yet to fully load all of the standard packages.

On MS/Windows the system administrator can place the same lines into the site wide initialisation file, which will be something like:

C:\Program FilesRR-2.7.0\etcRprofile.site

A user can also have their own initialisation file (.Rprofile) in their home folder:

C:\Documents and Settings\Kayon\My Documents

The home folder is where R starts up by default, and we can check what it is using getwd:

> getwd()
[1] "C:\Documents and Settings\Kayon\My Documents"