[ESS] ESS and .Rhistory

[Martin Maechler]

On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 18:48, Yihui Xie <xie at yihui.name> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Has this been changed in ESS 5.14?

Nope...  It was just a proposal by Stephen .. and we had forgotten about it.

BTW (to ESS-core): There's also an ess-history-directory variable
(with a "nice" idea behind: You can think of a person-wide "global"
history file),
which is not at all made use of, currently... and we should

> I still see .Rhistory even if I set
> ess-history-file to be nil, which has been a pain for me for a long
> time.
>
> Thanks!
>
> BTW, the trick from Erik works very well.
>
> Regards,
> Yihui
> --
> Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
> Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name
> Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
> 2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA
>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 3:01 AM, Stephen Eglen
> <S.J.Eglen at damtp.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Dear Erik, Feng,
>>
>> Thanks for this -- I was blissfully unaware about this persistence of
>> history across R sessions.  Howabout if we change the semantics of
>> ess-history-file to be:
>>
>> nil -- do not attempt to read/write a history file
>> t -- use the default naming scheme for loading the history
>> "some.string" -- use this value as the filename.
>>
>>
>> Stephen
>>> Feng,
>>>
>>> On 04/20/2011 09:00 AM, Feng Li wrote:
>>> > Dear list,
>>> >
>>> > I tried to change the ESS default R history to a permanent file so
>>> > that ESS does not generate .Rhistory everywhere. I tried both
>>> >
>>> > (setq ess-history-directory "~/.R/history")
>>> >
>>> > and
>>> >
>>> > (setq ess-history-file "~/.R/history/.Rhistory")
>>>
>>> If I recall correctly, it's because of the way the ess-history-file
>>> variable is set in the ESS code.  The following works for me:
>>>
>>>   (defun ei-no-rhistory ()
>>>     (setq ess-history-file "/dev/null"))
>>>
>>>   (add-hook 'inferior-ess-mode-hook 'ei-no-rhistory)
>>>
>>>
>>> where "ei" in the function name is just my initials.  See if that
>>> works for you. You can change /dev/null to whatever you want.  There
>>> may be a cleaner solution, but I was just happy not to find .Rhistory
>>> files all over the place, which bother me greatly for some unknown
>>> reason :).
>>>
>>> --Erik
>>>