[R] help needed with help

[Marc Schwartz]

On Apr 30, 2010, at 11:20 AM, Trevor Hastie wrote:

> I installed 
> R version 2.11.0 (2010-04-22)
> on may macbook (snow leopard)
> and run R from within emacs
> 
> Now when I try to get help, I get
>> ?lm
> 
> (in the new "help" window)
> 
> 
> Error in help("lm", htmlhelp = FALSE) : 
>  unused argument(s) (htmlhelp = FALSE)
> 
> 
> 
> Help!
> 
> p.s. I am running:
> This is GNU Emacs 22.2.50.1 (i386-apple-darwin9.4.0, Carbon Version 1.6.0)
> of 2008-07-17 on seijiz.local


Prof. Hastie,

Presumably somewhere in your~/.emacs file you may have a reference to:

  (setq inferior-ess-r-help-command ...)

Either add the following or replace the above if present, with:

  (setq inferior-ess-r-help-command "help(\"%s\", help_type=\"html\")\n")

Note that the above requires ESS 5.5 or greater.

If you are interested Vincent Goulet has a binary DMG for Emacs 23 and ESS 5.8 here:

  http://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca/en/ressources/emacs/mac

which might save you some time if you wish to update Emacs. I don't use it as I build Emacs 23 from CVS, but a quick look suggests that he might not yet have added the above help fix for R 2.11.0.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz