[R] R command history -- can it be like Matlab's?

[hadley wickham]

On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 4:39 PM, Rolf Turner <r.turner at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
>
> On 30/07/2008, at 9:16 AM, hadley wickham wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 2:45 PM, Prof Brian Ripley
>> <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>> A patch to do this was posted on 2007-09-29 by Glenn Davis.  Some people
>>> not
>>> addicted to Matlab find the behaviour very inconvenient and prefer the
>>> getline/readline behaviour (triggered by ^R/^S) of Rterm and R on Unixen.
>>
>> On unixen you can redefine your up/down arrows in your .inputrc:
>>
>> "\e[A": history-search-backward
>> "\e[B": history-search-forward
>>
>> which I find really useful, but it definitely takes a few weeks of
>> getting used to.  I suspect there maybe an equivalent for Rterm.
>
>        Those of us who (sensibly! :-) ) use vi have:
>
>                set editing-mode vi
>
>        in our .inputrc files.
>
>        Then <esc> puts you into vi editing mode whence ``/'' searches
>        ``forwards'' and ``?'' searches ``backwards'' --- with the convention
>        that the most recent command is the ``top'' of the file.
>
>        And then when you've found the command that you want, you can edit it
>        (with vi syntax) before pressing <return> to re-issue the command.

And you might also want to beef up the size of your history file (and
automatically remove duplicates). I have the following in my
bash_profile (and I assume similar functionality exists for other
shells):

export HISTSIZE=1000
export HISTFILESIZE=5000
export HISTCONTROL=erasedups

Hadley



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