[R] personalize regression printing?

[ivo welch]

dear R experts:

I am often struggling with a desire of wanting to change the basic
output that R prints.

For example, a year ago, I wanted to add the mean to the summary()
statement, and eventually got help from friendly souls who showed me
how to copy the summary() routine and then modify it.

now I would like to abbrev some of the output from summary(lm()).  For
example, I want to eliminate the "Residuals" output.  I also am not
quite sure why "Call:" is followed by a new line rather than just with
a continuation of the model itself.  I also wonder why the word
"Coefficients" seems to consume a line without being particularly
helpful.  I wonder if "Coef" could appear before "Estimate Std. Error"
on the same line.  All these are changes that would allow me to see
more information on the same page.

I do know that I can copy the functions themselves, if I can find
them, and replace them myself.  However, this means that future
versions of R may make changes that I may miss completely.  Its a
solution, yes.

However, my first question is---for summary(lm()), would it make sense
to have more options that control the output?  At least to suppress
the printing of the distribution of the residuals?

A long-term solution, which is easy to suggest for me given that I do
not have to do any work to implement it, would be to allow some
templates that specify how output should be formatted.  R would first
load the system templates, and thereafter any templates that the user
specifies (has overridden).  The R functions would then work according
to the current template.    Talking is easy; Walking is hard, of
course.  Just a suggestion...

Regards,

/iaw