Warning
Pre-alpha software. This is a GTK4 port built primarily to exercise the Rgtk4 bindings. It is not ready for research use. Data loss is possible, especially when importing or editing files. Always keep backups of your projects.
RQDA is a rewrite of the RQDA qualitative data analysis package for R, updated to run on GTK4 via Rgtk4 bindings. The original RQDA was built on RGtk2, which no longer runs on current desktop environments.
RQDA is a tool for qualitative coding — reading through text documents and marking passages with codes (themes, categories, labels). The basic workflow:
- Create a project (stored as a SQLite database)
- Import plain-text documents
- Define codes and organise them into categories
- Mark passages in documents with one or more codes
- Organise files into cases and assign attributes (metadata such as demographics)
- Retrieve and browse coded passages, cross-reference cases and codes, export results
The database format is compatible with the original RQDA 0.2.x — existing projects can be opened. New columns added by RQDA4 (freecode.color, attributes.class) are added via ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN with tryCatch and are silently ignored if you open the project in the legacy version again.
Non-GUI functions (rqda_sel, rqda_exe, summaryCodings, queryFiles, filesByCodes, getCodingTable, %and%, %or%, %not%, etc.) work in an R console session without a GUI.
Install GTK4 for your platform first (see System requirements), then:
# Install Rgtk4 from GitHub
remotes::install_github("JanMarvin/Rgtk4")
# Install RQDA4
remotes::install_github("RQDA/RQDA4")Launch:
library(RQDA)
RQDA()This is a showcase and test bed for Rgtk4. Most of the original RQDA functionality is present but things are rough around the edges. If you find a bug or know GTK4 well, contributions are welcome.
Written by Ronggui Huang.
Project page: https://rqda.r-forge.r-project.org/
Source: https://github.com/RQDA/RQDA
BSD 3-Clause — same as the original RQDA.
This port was created using vibe coding with Claude (Anthropic). The human author provided direction, tested the output, and reported bugs; Claude generated the majority of the R code. Porting ~20 R source files from RGtk2 to GTK4 in a few days would not have been practical any other way — the GTK4 API surface is large, the Rgtk4 bindings are underdocumented, and the original RQDA codebase predates modern R conventions throughout.
If something looks odd, it probably is.