[ESS] Problems invoking help when R wants to know which (of > 1) help pages you are looking for

[Rodney Sparapani]

Steve Lianoglou wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Using ESS, I've always been tripped up when I try to invoke ?help on a
> particular function when there are several possible help options to
> consider and R is asking us which one we want (vial making a selection
> via the keyboard).
> 
> An example would be loading the BiocGenerics package (bioconductor)
> and invoking `?lapply` (it makes an S4 generic out of it)
> 
> R asks you if you want help in base::lapply or BiocGenerics::lapply. I
> have help configured to open in ESS, and it usually just hangs. It
> used to be that if I punch ctrl-g and ctrl-c enough times it'll "snap
> out of it," but now it just hangs and I can't back out -- the only
> option (I think) I have left is to kill emacs and start over. This
> perma-hanging thing might be because I recently set `(setq
> ess-eval-visibly-p nil)` so that blocks of R code eval'd via C-c C-r
> don't hang emacs[1] (not sure), but either way the behavior I was
> experience never really felt right.
> 
> Is there something I can do (or settings to check/tweak) to fix this?
> Or am I alone in experiencing this?
> 
> I'm runninng emacs 23.4 and ess 12.04 on OSX.6.8
> 
> Thanks,
> -steve
> 
> [1] as suggested here:
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/ess-help/2012-April/007745.html
> 

I don't have the BiocGenerics
package installed.  Do you have this issue with other generic
functions like print?

Rodney