[R] help with help()

[Marc Schwartz]

On Oct 28, 2010, at 1:32 PM, Marc Schwartz wrote:

> On Oct 28, 2010, at 1:20 PM, claudia tebaldi wrote:
> 
>> Hi all
>> 
>> Just this morning I upgraded to R 2.12.0  (for Mac OS X 10.6.4).
>> All went well until I needed to run a help() or help.search() in my session,
>> which I'm running within Emacs (ESS 5.3.7).
>> Say I need help with the command 'density'. When I type
>> 
>> help(density)
>> or
>> ?density
>> 
>> the ESS help buffer opens, it is titled *help[R](density)* but it contains
>> only a couple of lines saying, e.g.,
>> 
>> Error in help("density", htmlhelp = FALSE) :
>> unused argument(s) (htmlhelp = FALSE)
>> 
>> This is a problem only running R within emacs. The command help() works fine
>> if I run R at the command line in  a terminal window or if I use the
>> stand-alone R application.
>> 
>> Thank you in advance
>> 
>> Claudia
> 
> 
> Put the following in your ~/.emacs file:
> 
> (setq inferior-ess-r-help-command "help(\"%s\", help_type=\"html\")\n")
> 
> 
> You might also want to update to ESS 5.11:
> 
> http://ess.r-project.org/index.php?Section=download
> 
> or consider using Vincent Goulet's pre-packaged Emacs 23/ESS install:
> 
>  http://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca/en/ressources/emacs/mac


One quick additional note. The above .emacs inclusion requires ESS 5.5 or greater. So you will definitely need to update. 5.3.7 is over two years old.

Marc