[R] .Rprofile and help startup

[William Simpson]

Today I wanted to get R help to start up in text mode under Windows
XP. I had my own notes on how to do that. The method described there
didn't work. I checked on R-help. No helpful messages on the subject.
Therefore I post here in the hope that it helps someone else (or
myself, when I forget and search Rhelp again in future).

The short story is that R seems to have changed recently (and maybe
updates to Windows XP affected file naming).

- as before, .Rprofile is placed in home directory, which is shown by doing:
Sys.getenv("R_USER")
- newer versions of Windows XP don't like to use filenames (eg .Rprofile) with
a dot as first character! Have to rename file via start>Run>cmd
- Need to put following line in .Rprofile:
options(help_type="text")

Old instructions to put
options(chmhelp ="FALSE")
in .Rprofile do NOT work.

Cheers,
Bill