[ESS] Problems invoking help when R wants to know which (of > 1) help pages you are looking for

[Steve Lianoglou]

Hi,

Using ESS, I've always been tripped up when I try to invoke ?help on a
particular function when there are several possible help options to
consider and R is asking us which one we want (vial making a selection
via the keyboard).

An example would be loading the BiocGenerics package (bioconductor)
and invoking `?lapply` (it makes an S4 generic out of it)

R asks you if you want help in base::lapply or BiocGenerics::lapply. I
have help configured to open in ESS, and it usually just hangs. It
used to be that if I punch ctrl-g and ctrl-c enough times it'll "snap
out of it," but now it just hangs and I can't back out -- the only
option (I think) I have left is to kill emacs and start over. This
perma-hanging thing might be because I recently set `(setq
ess-eval-visibly-p nil)` so that blocks of R code eval'd via C-c C-r
don't hang emacs[1] (not sure), but either way the behavior I was
experience never really felt right.

Is there something I can do (or settings to check/tweak) to fix this?
Or am I alone in experiencing this?

I'm runninng emacs 23.4 and ess 12.04 on OSX.6.8

Thanks,
-steve

[1] as suggested here:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/ess-help/2012-April/007745.html

-- 
Steve Lianoglou
Graduate Student: Computational Systems Biology
 | Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
 | Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Contact Info: http://cbio.mskcc.org/~lianos/contact