[R] RGui: windows-record and command history

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 3/23/06, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
> On 3/23/2006 10:29 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> > On 3/23/06, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
> >> On 3/23/2006 7:35 AM, Thomas Steiner wrote:
> >> > a) How can I set the recording of all windows()-history forever to
> >> > "true"? I want something like windows(record = TRUE) but not just for
> >> > the window that opens then, but for all windows I will open ever.
> >>
> >> options(graphics.record=TRUE)
> >>
> >> will make that happen for the rest of the session.  To really make it
> >> happen forever, you need to put this line in your Rprofile (see
> >> ?Rprofile for where that comes from).
> >>
> >> Watch out though:  the graphics history is stored in your current
> >> workspace in memory, and it can get big.  You might find you're running
> >> out of memory if you store everything, and you'll find your .RData files
> >> quite large if you save your workspace.
> >>
> >> On my todo list (but not for 2.3.0) is the possibility of setting a
> >> default history length, perhaps defaulting to saving the last 2 or 3
> >> pages.
> >
> > Would it be feasible to have history on disk or perhaps the last
> > m in memory and the last n (possibly Inf) on disk?
>
> The history is just another R object.  Saving big R objects on disk
> might be desirable, but it would be a big change, so I'd call it
> infeasible.  I wouldn't want to get into special-casing this particular
> R object:  that way lies madness.
>
> However, since it is just an R object, it's available for R code to work
> with, so someone who was interested in doing this could write a
> contributed package that did it.

Are there R-level facilities to manipulate the history, not
just the top?