[R-SIG-Mac] Assignment arrow

[Simon Urbanek]

John,

On Feb 10, 2007, at 6:25 PM, John Shonder wrote:

> To use R on my Mac, I had been running ESS in emacs under X11. I  
> found R.app, and much prefer it -- especially the quartz graphics  
> -- but there's one thing I miss about ESS: to get an assignment  
> arrow "<-" you just type shift underscore. In R.app, you have to  
> type the less than sign (shift-comma) followed by the dash. Coming  
> over from ESS, the extra keystroke bothers me.
>

To be honest IMHO it's one of the annoying "features" in ESS  
(configurable, though, I presume), because "_" is a valid character  
used in names, so you end up getting broken code like .Platform$r <-  
arch instead of the intended .Platform$r_arch when copy/pasting code.  
In old times it was legal to use _ instead of <-, so ESS was helping  
to make your code more legible without changing the syntax (a_10 was  
the same as a <- 10), but that is not true anymore.


> Is there an easier way to type an assignment arrow in R.app? Some  
> way to make a keyboard macro perhaps? I've looked through the FAQ  
> and can't find anything. I appreciate any assistance.
>

= is probably the best one-key alternative in most cases.

Unfortunately adding a "macro"-type thing is not that easy in the  
current setup (e.g. I could imagine using something like <alt>+<=> or  
possibly better <alt>+<->), but I'll see if it is easier for the  
upcoming version 2 of the GUI.

Cheers,
Simon