[ESS] More forgiving help system

[R. Michael Weylandt <michael.weylandt@gmail.com>]

On Aug 9, 2013, at 5:34, Vitalie Spinu <spinuvit at gmail.com> wrote:

>>> "R. Michael Weylandt <michael.weylandt at gmail.com>" <michael.weylandt at gmail.com>
>>> on Thu, 8 Aug 2013 16:28:00 -0400 wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Good luck:)
> 
>> 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").
> 
> Not only RStudio but simple R also allows it. I have committed the
> change to ESS-dev. You can use the following for time being:
> 
> (setq inferior-R--input-?-help-regexp
>      "^ *\\(?:\\(?1:[a-zA-Z ]*?\\?\\{1,2\\}\\) *\\(?2:.+\\)\\)")

Thank you. 

> 
> BTW, what is wrong with C-c C-d C-d?

Only that I didn't know it ;-)

> 
>> 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.
> 
> No way right now. But what is the problem with multiple buffers? It is
> very handy because you can switch between already opened help
> buffers. Emacs might have hundreds of buffers at a time and you cannot
> request from every application you use to limit the number buffers. Just
> learn your way through emacs buffers with efficient use of ido, ibufer,
> iflip etc and you will never be bothered by buffers again.

Will explore -- I use ido already but will look into ibufer and iflip. 

Thanks for the quick response!

Michael

> 
>    Vitalie