[ESS] Read R manuals inside emacs

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 6 March 2022 at 14:22, Naresh Gurbuxani via ESS-help wrote:
| On my Mac installation of R, below documents are included in RHOME/doc/manual:
| R-intro.html
| R-data.html
| [others]
| 
| Is it possible to read them from inside emacs (for example in info)? 

Yes, if you have the info files installed. Which I presume is the default; I
am on Linux where the distribution packages tend to have them. (I look after
the ess package for Debian/Ubuntu [but that is irrelevant as there are no
more ess releases, hint, hint, ...]).

I have quite a few:

  edd using rob:~$ ls -1 /usr/share/info/*info*gz | wc -l
  120
  edd using rob:~$ 


| One of the files (RHOME/share/man/man1/R.1) says, to access R manuals, type
| info -f R-intro
| 
| Where should this command be typed?

C-h i       gets you the list of all manuals the within-emacs info reader
            knows / are in the standard info location (iirc you can override
            with env vars, on Linux you generally do no need to)

m R Ex<TAB> then tab-completes to 'R Extensions' and

m R Intro<TAB>   tab-completes to the 'R Introduction'

and so on. There are info-reading keyboard command shortcuts to browse. It is
actually the main way in which I read / have read / am reading these
files. (Though the quarto-built ones at https://rstudio.github.io/r-manuals/ 
are very nice to link to.)
 
| Finally, is this the right mailing group for this question?

Sure, why not?

Dirk

-- 
https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org