[ESS] "no longer seeing the help files" (was '[R] Adjusting axis labels ..')

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com>
>>>>>     on Fri, 14 Oct 2016 15:51:39 -0700 writes:

[..............]

    > I need to figure out why I'm no longer seeing the help files. As far as I
    > know they should be loaded when I invoke R.

and earlier you mentioned you are using ESS

    > Thanks very much,
    > Rich

    > ______________________________________________
    > R-help at r-project.org mailing list

It could be that you've stumbled over the same problem I had
stumbled on, ca 10 days ago, when I upgraded from emacs 24.x to
emacs 25.1  and from Fedora 22 to 24 Linux.

Somehow, 'stty' settings got changed in my setup, and together
with an old environment variable default of  PAGER=more, and 
*R* printing help(.) to the ESS help buffer using the pager,
this also lead to "not appearing help pages" (because more is
interactive, and was waiting for "page forward" inside the ESS help
buffer .. yuck !!).

For that reason, in the the development version of ESS (also
available from MELPA as far as I know), we now do make use of
the ess-pager variable (again) which defaults to "cat" on Linux,
and that *did* solve the above problem for me.

BTW: We plan to release  ESS 16.10  in ca. 10 days, so would be
     happy if many of you started to "beta test" it.
     --> see another e-mail with a different subject

Martin Maechler
ETH Zurich