[Rd] RAqua line-editor navigation keys

[Douglas Bates]

Peter McMahan <peter_mcmahan at yahoo.com> writes:

> this is a suggestion for a feature in future releases
> of RAqua for mac OS X:
> It would be very nice if the gui conformed to the
> navigation keys that most other os x apps do (with the
> exception of ms word and mozilla).  i am referring to
> the use of ctrl- f, b, n, p, e, and a for navigating
> forward one character, backwards one character, up one
> line, down one line, to the end of a line, and to the
> beginning of a line, respectively.  also, ctrl-d to
> delete forward would be convenient.

I believe these started as the emacs (and later readline) keybindings.

> these work in the command-line version from terminal
> because they work with everything in terminal.

I imagine they work in R under a terminal because of inclusion of the
readline library, not because "they work with everything".

> this is not major, of course, but it would be nice and would go a
> long way to make RAqua feel more native to os x.

Alternatively, you could use the ESS package with emacs or xemacs
under OS X (but I can understand if emacs doesn't seem very
Macintosh-like :-). Anyone who has attended presentations by both Steve
Jobs and Richard Stallman would have difficulty imagining the two of
them finding common ground.

-- 
Douglas Bates                            bates at stat.wisc.edu
Statistics Department                    608/262-2598
University of Wisconsin - Madison        http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~bates/