how to 'block' the prompt

[Sebastian Luque]

Dear List,

I haven't found help in the documentation or in ESS archives regarding the 
following. I'd like to be able to have the R prompt be unerasable while 
working on Emacs (21.3.1) + ESS (5.2.2) (Debian Linux). Sometimes I 
accidentally erase the prompt and I'm forced to press <return> to get it back 
and keep typing commands. In other words, I would like to have a prompt that 
behaves like that from R when it's run in a shell. I'm not sure this is 
something that is controlled from ESS, or from some other Emacs setting, as 
I've seen similar behaviour when running eshell, for instance.

If this can be configured somehow, can one still select the prompt for 
copying/pasting into other buffers?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Best
Sebastian