[ESS] the R help system

Kasper Daniel Hansen khansen at stat.Berkeley.EDU
Thu Aug 7 19:37:37 CEST 2008


I have two things which are either enhancement requests or just me not  
doing the right thing. Both are related to the R help system. My  
examples below are for a S4 class from package Biobase, but it should  
be generally applicable.

1) S4 classes. If I do C-c C-v and try to find the help page on the  
class ExpressionSet, I can get the help page if I type "ExpressionSet- 
class", but not via TAB completion. If I (from the R command prompt)  
type ?"ExpressionSet-class" I get a normal help page buffer, but if I  
do class?ExpressionSet, the help is printed in the R buffer instead of  
its own window.

2) conflicting help pages. If I have two packages, both with a help  
page linking to the same term (an excellent example right now is the  
Bioconductor package "affy" and the help page for image), I used to  
get an annoying tcltk window popping up. It was annoying and slow, but  
worked. Recently I put the following in my Rprofile
   options(menu.graphics = FALSE)
If I now do ?image from an R session, the little selection menu is not  
displayed at the R prompt, but rather in a separate read-only help  
buffer. If I try to do C-c C-v image, the same happens.

Kasper




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