[ESS] More forgiving help system

R. Michael Weylandt <michael.weylandt@gmail.com> michael.weylandt at gmail.com
Thu Aug 8 22:28:00 CEST 2013


Hello ESS folks,

I'm trying to get back to using ESS more and I'm afraid I keep tripping over a bad habit that another (lesser) R editor silently allowed. 

In RStudio, if I were to type 

> ? rnorm

I would get the help page but the same line in ESS throws as error because it gets translated to help(" rnorm") instead of help("rnorm"). 

I think all I need is a place I can put in a hook to make ? map to 

help(gsub("^\\s+|\\s+$", "", x))

instead of help(x) but I'm struggling to find just the right incantation. It probably involves setting inferior-ess-r-help-command somehow. 

Help or documentation pointers much appreciated. 

ESS 13.05 on GNU Emacs 23.3.1

Michael

PS. Is there a variable analogous to ess-help-own-frame I can set so that I only have one ESS help buffer at a time? I tried ess-help-own-buffer but it didn't seem to work. 


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