[R-sig-Fedora] Scrolling in Help System Doesn't Work

[Michael Smith]

On 08/05/2011 11:30 PM, Marc Schwartz wrote:
> On Aug 5, 2011, at 10:08 AM, Tom Callaway wrote:
> 
>> On 08/05/2011 10:40 AM, Michael Smith wrote:
>>> UsRs,
>>>
>>> When accessing help by typing, for example,
>>>> ?read.table
>>> the up and down keys do no longer scroll the help page. The page-up and
>>> page-down keys also do not work any longer. I can scroll down by
>>> pressing the d key, but I cannot scroll up by pressing the b key
>>> (although it should work according to the text displayed when you press
>>> the h key).
>>>
>>> I'm not sure whether this question is Fedora-specific, but since this
>>> list is most close to my configuration I first would like to know if
>>> this can be replicated (or maybe I'm missing something obvious).
>>
>> By default, R uses "more" as a pager. You can see this by looking at /usr/lib[64]/R/etc/Renviron, specifically, the "PAGER" variable. If you wanted to switch to a pager that supports up-down scrolling, switch it to /usr/bin/less.
>>
>> ~tom
> 
> 
> Just to add to Tom's reply, if you would prefer to use HTML help pages and view them in a browser, you can put:
> 
>   options(help_type="html")
> 
> in your ~/.Rprofile
> 
> See ?options and ?help
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Marc Schwartz
> 

Thank you so much for your feedback, I appreciate it very much. The
following commands changed the pager to less:

# cd /usr/lib64/R/etc/
# cp Renviron Renviron_backup
# sed -i 's_/bin/more_/usr/bin/less_g' Renviron

On my old F13 box, R 2.13.0 still uses "less" by default. Since "less"
is often regarded as a more sophisticated version of "more", I wonder
why this change has been made.

Thanks,
Michael