help output paged in separate window
On Sun, 25 May 2003 10:42:27 +0100 (BST)
Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
On 24-May-03 Ted Harding wrote:
I use R in X windows on Linux. [...] Often, I would like to have the output from 'help' pop up in a separate window so that I can continue to work in the R window while reading the help. The "help" window could then be closed when interest in this particular help dwindles. [...]
Thanks to Jonathan Baron and Peter Dalgaard for private comments and help on this question. Peter in particular pointed out that library(tcltk); options(pager=tkpager) does the trick of detaching the pager from the R window exactly as desired, with relatively small overhead (as opposed to an HTML browser for 'help.start', or ESS: I put enough load on this 48MB laptop without having a multimegabyte Fat Man sitting on my memory).
tkpager works well; I just wish it handled the "see also" links to other help files. I wish that help.start() would work with the blazing fast html browser dillo (Linux/Unix). dillo is a 240K executable written in C. Frank --- Frank E Harrell Jr Prof. of Biostatistics & Statistics Div. of Biostatistics & Epidem. Dept. of Health Evaluation Sciences U. Virginia School of Medicine http://hesweb1.med.virginia.edu/biostat