[R] setting editor environment variable EDITOR either when configuring R for installation or in .Rprofile

[Marc Schwartz]

on 07/30/2008 12:54 PM Mark Kimpel wrote:
> I'm running R on Linux and use emacs as my editor. When doing
> "edit(vignette(foo.vignette))" I would like to invoke emacs rather than the
> default vi. I am able to manually set this by editing $R_HOME/etc/Renviron
> but would like to avoid doing this with each install. I assume this can be
> accomplished with a flag to .configure or in .Rprofile but I can't find the
> syntax in R-admin. Editor is not listed as an environment variable in
> appendix B of that manual.
> 
> So, help is appreciated as I've probably missed something.
> Mark
> 

Mark,

See ?options for 'editor'. This is also referenced in ?edit, where the 
default value for the 'editor' argument is getOption("editor").

Thus, in your .Rprofile, put:

   options(editor="emacs")

HTH,

Marc Schwartz