This is the massage sent by John Fox to the R-pkgs mailing list: Dear R users, I’d like to announce a new version, 1.8-1, of the Rcmdr package. The Rcmdr (“R Commander”) package provides a basic-statistics graphical user interface (GUI) to R, implemented in Tcl/Tk via the standard R tcltk package. Beyond small changes and additions, the new version of the Rcmdr package uniformly implements a feature, first available in version 1.7-0, that allows dialogs to retain users’ previous selections. This feature is activated by setting the Rcmdr option retain.selections to TRUE, which is now the default choice (see ?Commander). When retain.selections is TRUE, participating dialogs acquire a Reset button, which will restore them to pristine state. As well, dialogs that access the current Rcmdr data set are automatically reset when the data set changes. The selection-retention mechanism can also be used by authors of Rcmdr plug-in packages. Although the new Rcmdr package has been tested, it’s possible that problems will surface, and as always I’m grateful for bug reports. Kosar Karimi Pour, a graduate-student assistant, helped me in adapting the Rcmdr dialogs to employ the new selection-retention feature. Best wishes for the new year, John