Some action, very possibly not represented in the visible code, has closed the interactive screen device. It could be done either by a “click” on a close-button. (Could also be done by an extra dev.off() when plotting to a file-graphics device. This may happen if you paste in a mult-line plotting command that has a dev,off() at the end of it but errors out at the opening of the external device but then has hte dev.off() on a separate line so it accidentally closes the interactive device).
Some (most?) R implementations will start up a screen graphics device open automatically, but if you close it down, you then need to re-initialize it. On Windows that might be window()
; on a Mac, quartz()
; and on a linux box, x11()
. You also may need to issue a plot.new()
command. I just follow orders. When I get that error I issue plot.new()
and if I don’t see a plot window, I issue quartz()
as well. I then start over from the beginning with a new plot(., ., ...)
command and any further additions to that plot screen image.