r – plot.new has not been called yet

r – plot.new has not been called yet

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, or it could also be done by an extra dev.off() when plotting to a file-graphics device. (The second possibility might happen if you paste in a multi-line plotting command that has a dev.off() at the end of it, but had errored out at the opening of the external device. So the dangling dev.off() on a separate line 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 dont 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.

In my case, I was trying to call plot(x, y) and lines(x, predict(yx.lm), col=red) in two separate chunks in Rmarkdown file. It worked without problems when running chunk by chunk, but the corresponding document wouldnt knit. After I moved all plotting calls within one chunk, problem was resolved.

r – plot.new has not been called yet

As a newbie, I faced the same problem.

In newbie terms :
when you call plot(), the graph window gets the focus and you cannot enter further commands into R. That is when you conclude that you must close the graph window to return to R.
However, some commands, like identify(), act on open/active graph windows.
When identify() cannot find an open/active graph window, it gives this error message.

However, you can simply click on the R window without closing the graph window. Then you can type more commands at the R prompt, like identify() etc.