[Rd] minor problems (if problems at all): <ESC> in RGui; finding some (PR#799)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 2 Jan 2001 H.RINNER@TIROL.GV.AT wrote:

> [These things don't seem to be of too great importance and may well not meet
> the criteria of a "bug", but, for what it's worth,I thought I'd submit them
> to r-bugs anyway:]
> 
> This is the R version:
> > version
>          _              
> platform i386-pc-mingw32
> arch     x86            
> os       Win32          
> system   x86, Win32     
> status                  
> major    1              
> minor    2.0            
> year     2000           
> month    12             
> day      15             
> language R 
> 
> This is what we noticed:
> 
> 1) In RGui, when something is typed in a command line, pressing <ESC> in
> R1.0.0 used to delete the written text and go to a blank new line; in R1.2.0
> the text is not deleted and the user is prompted for new input in the same
> line.
> Of course, this is rather a "cosmetical" issue, but it might be worth
> considering to change this behaviour back to what it used to be in R1.0.0?

Nope, that is deliberate.  Use ^U to delete the text, if that is what you
want: Esc was never documented to do so.  The problem here is that some
other process (for example a GUI widget) might have written something to
the screen, and you don't want that deleted.

Moral: don't rely on undocumented side effects.

> 2) It looks like if for some functions, their help pages cannot be accessed
> directly via "?" or "help". For example, ?install.packages, or ?setwd, won't
> find the appropriate help page (I am using winhelp, to be specific).
> This might be because e.g. "setwd" shares the same help file with "getwd",
> and it looks like only "getwd" is part of the index of the help system.
> Here, the same holds for R1.0.0.

The critical thing here is that you are using winhelp, and that is
`rough'.  It works with all the four other help systems.  Can we persuade
you to move into the 21st century and used winhelp's replacement, CHTML?

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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