[ESS] feature request : completion of available packages name

[Martin Maechler]

On Tue, Jan 3, 2017 at 6:30 PM, Samuel BARRETO
<samuel.barreto8 using gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Do you think it would be difficult to add some kind of completion backend
> to complete the package names when typing `library(` ?
> I was thinking that the list of packages could be populated by calling
> something like :
>
> names(installed.packages()[,2])
>
> But I don't know enough elisp to implement it myself…

Don't do it the way Rstudio does (it has very slow startup time, in
parts of its interface, because it not only wants to know the package
names of all my many thousand packages in my dozen of libraries in
.libPaths(), but it also want to prepare all the help pages ... or
something close to that).

More seriously: We do something like that already in ESS for quite a
while now.... but I don't recall the details.
You also may want to give more details about the kind of completion..
notably as emacs / ESS have quite a few different completion
possibilities, as we have been told recently here.

Martin Maechler
ETH Zurich

>
> Thanks !
> Samuel Barreto
>