[R] Tab completion / X11 fatal IO error

[Adam D. I. Kramer]

Dear colleagues,

 	I have two questions about R that I cannot answer via google
searching:

1) Is there any way to speed up tab completion? This is near-instant in
bash, and occasionally takes upwards of 10 seconds in R.  When I hit tab,
I've usually typed dataframe$ab or lst$ab or something, and
length(colnames(dataframe)) or length(names(lst)) are rarely very long.

2) I often run R from the linux command-line in a screen session on a remote
computer. As such, to see graphics, I tunnel X through ssh, then run screen,
then run X11("localhost:10") which opens an X window on my screen, just as
desired. However, if I forget to dev.off() before logging out of ssh (or
before the ssh connection drops on its own, which it does with some
frequency, hence running 'screen'), I come back to an error like this one:

> Error: X11 fatal IO error: please save work and shut down R

...and then I shut down R (saving my data, which takes a few minutes) and
then load R again (loading my data, which once again takes several minutes),
which is a pretty big time sink.  Is this error message quite serious?  I
know and do not mind that the X connection has died, and I can't imagine
that this would really cause too many troubles, but I'm a bit afraid to
ignore a message that says to save and shut down.

> version
                _ 
platform       x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu 
arch           x86_64 
os             linux-gnu 
system         x86_64, linux-gnu 
status 
major          2 
minor          8.0 
year           2008 
month          10 
day            20 
svn rev        46754 
language       R 
version.string R version 2.8.0 (2008-10-20)

Thanks in advance,
Adam Kramer