[ESS] help in R 2.10 Windows

Ross Boylan ross at biostat.ucsf.edu
Mon Nov 2 22:08:52 CET 2009


On Mon, 2009-11-02 at 12:40 -0800, Ross Boylan wrote:
> I'm using R 2.10 on Windows XP with ESS 5.5.
> 
> Since the previous discussion indicates startup scripts are problematic
> for setting help, I set inferior-ess-help-command to "help(\"%s\",
> help_type=\"text\")".
> 
> After this, when I use ? the system hangs until I do ctl-g.  When I then
> do ctl-c ctl-c the help text prints out in the main *R* buffer.
> 
> I wanted text mostly because it took too long to get the help into the
> browser (MSIE), even after the browser was opened.
> 
> Then I changed the help command to
>  "help(\"%s\", help_type=\"html\")",
> hoping at least to avoid the "htmlhelp is deprecated" warnings that
> appeared as if they were regular ess help buffers.
> 
> However, I still have to type at least ctl-g and enter to get the help
> to appear in the browser.
> 
And then I noticed that the original strings had \n at the end.  By
adding that, the first variant works (help inside of Emacs in a separate
buffer).  If I get help on a command I already got htmlhelp for I see
the old text buffer; ordinarily that would be the right thing to do.  In
my case I see
Warning message:
In help("intervals", htmlhelp = TRUE) :
  htmhelp = TRUE is deprecated: use help_type ="html"
Killing the old buffer cleans things up.

That still leaves the problem of how to make the setting persistent so I
don't need to set the variable each session.  I'm not sure if the
previous thread on help implies I can set something in .Rprofile or not.

Ross



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