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Major update to R package btw: prettier code, BayesTraitsV3 and Windows support

I’ve finished a long-overdue update to btw, my R package for running BayesTraits from R. There are three significant changes in version 2 of btw:

  1. btw is now compatible with both Mac OS and Windows systems. Shout out to Peter Ranacher for contributing code to run btw functions on Windows, which I modified and incorporated into the update.

  2. User input is now much more flexible. I have replaced the many functions containing a dizzying array of arguments with a single function that accepts a character vector containing the desired BayesTraits commands, with each command having its own character string. These commands are copied as-is into the input.txt file. Thus, any commands you can pass to BayesTraitsV3, you can pass to btw. In addition to adding flexibility for users, this format makes it easier for anyone who is familiar with BayesTraits to learn to use btw.

  3. btw now supports all the new functionality of BayesTraitsV3. I endeavored to be thorough in importing and handling all of the different types of output from BayesTraitsV3. The only type of output btw doesn’t support is the variable rates model output, but I don’t recommend using this model anyway (read this paper to know why).

The updated project page provides more detail and a tutorial.

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