[Rd] ANN/RFC: package providing TAB completion for readline-based R

[Uwe Ligges]

Deepayan Sarkar wrote:
> Announcement:
> 
> (For those every-once-in-a-while occasions when you run R from a
> terminal instead of Emacs, and then wish something would happen when
> you hit TAB...)
> 
> Last week, I started looking at the GNU Readline documentation to see
> if I could figure out how to use it for command completion within R.
> It turned out to be easier than I had expected, and I now have a beta
> version of the 'rcompletion' package available at
> 
> http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~deepayan/R/rcompletion_0.0-6.tar.gz
> 
>>From the help page:
> 
> Description:
> 
>      This package provides pseudo-intelligent TAB completion for a
>      readline enabled instance of R when it is run from a terminal (or
>      more specifically, an interface which uses readline to accept user
>      input). It has no effect on the various GUI interfaces to R,
>      including ESS and the standard Windows interface.
> 
> For more details, install and load the package, then type
> 
> package?rcompletion
> 
> at the R prompt. Testing and feedback would be appreciated. Feature
> requests and patches are also welcome, of course.
> 
> 
> Questions:
> 
> There are a couple of things about which I would like some advice:
> 
> (1) The package currently contains a very rudimentary configure script
> which stops installation when readline is not found. I'm not sure if
> this is portable enough. .../src/unix/sys-std.c has more sophisticated
> conditional directives, but I don't know enough about this sort of
> thing to interpret those. Any thoughts or suggestions on this would be
> appreciated.
> 
> (2) What's the recommended procedure to distribute this, given that
> (a) it's not relevant on Windows (i.e. won't do anything even if it
> could be installed) and (b) may or may not be relevant on Macs, some
> of which apparently have a fake readline that doesn't support
> completion?


Distribution can happen regularly as a CRAN package. I will put it on my 
exclude list in order not to try building Windows binaries in that case.

Uwe


> -Deepayan
> 
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