[ESS] More forgiving help system

[Vitalie Spinu]

 >> "R. Michael Weylandt <michael.weylandt at gmail.com>" <michael.weylandt at gmail.com>
 >> on Thu, 8 Aug 2013 16:28:00 -0400 wrote:

 > Hello ESS folks,

 > I'm trying to get back to using ESS more and I'm afraid I keep
 > tripping over a bad habit that another (lesser) R editor silently
 > allowed.

Good luck:)

 > In RStudio, if I were to type 

 >> ? rnorm

 > I would get the help page but the same line in ESS throws as error
 > because it gets translated to help(" rnorm") instead of
 > help("rnorm").

Not only RStudio but simple R also allows it. I have committed the
change to ESS-dev. You can use the following for time being:

(setq inferior-R--input-?-help-regexp
      "^ *\\(?:\\(?1:[a-zA-Z ]*?\\?\\{1,2\\}\\) *\\(?2:.+\\)\\)")

BTW, what is wrong with C-c C-d C-d?

 > PS. Is there a variable analogous to ess-help-own-frame I can set so
 > that I only have one ESS help buffer at a time? I tried
 > ess-help-own-buffer but it didn't seem to work.

No way right now. But what is the problem with multiple buffers? It is
very handy because you can switch between already opened help
buffers. Emacs might have hundreds of buffers at a time and you cannot
request from every application you use to limit the number buffers. Just
learn your way through emacs buffers with efficient use of ido, ibufer,
iflip etc and you will never be bothered by buffers again.

    Vitalie