title: R Progress Bar in Separate Window
body: <p>I have noticed some strange behavior when using Windows progress bars in RStudio vs. Base R. Specifically, RStudio creates a progress bar in its own window (standalone in the taskbar), while Base R creates a progress bar in an "R window" (grouped together with R in the taskbar). See screenshot below for example.</p>
  
  <p>For my purposes, this becomes an issue when using Shiny applications because my progress bars <strong>do not</strong> pop up in front of the browser when using Base R (the user needs to click over to the R window in order to see them - see screenshot), while they <strong>do</strong> pop up as desired when running the exact same code in RStudio.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to change the behavior of progress bars in Base R to match the desired behavior in RStudio? I have tried looking through <code>options()</code> but couldn't find anything about progress bars.</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ha3dk.jpg" alt="Progress Bars"></p>
  
  <p>Here's a toy example using Shiny if you want to try it out:</p>
  
  <pre><code># Simple progress bar app
  require(shiny)
  runApp(list(
    ui = bootstrapPage(
      actionButton("goButton", "Go!")
    ),
    server = function(input, output) {
      observe({
        if(input$goButton &gt; 0) {
          pb = winProgressBar("test progress bar", "Some information in %",0, 100, 0)
          u = c(0, sort(runif(20, 0, 100)), 100)
          for(i in u) {
            Sys.sleep(0.1)
            info &lt;- sprintf("%d%% done", round(i))
            setWinProgressBar(pb, i, "test progress bar", info)
          }
          Sys.sleep(2)
          close(pb)
        }
      })
    }
  ))
  </code></pre>