From: Steve Dutky
As an inveterate user of vi, I was pleased to stumble on how
to use it for editing R commands.
When an interactive R session is launched under unix, the
command line editor most likely defaults to emacs. Typing
<esc>,<ctrl>+j will switch this to vi editing mode (see below
for possible exceptions).
excerpted from readline(3) manpage:
vi-editing-mode (M-C-j)
When in emacs editing mode, this causes a switch to
vi editing mode.
emacs-editing-mode (C-e)
When in vi editing mode, this causes a switch to emacs
editing mode.
An emacs-style notation is used to denote keystrokes.
Control keys are denoted by C-key, e.g.,C-n means Control-
N. Similarly, meta keys are denoted by M-key, so M-x means
Meta-X. (On keyboards without a meta key, M-x means ESC x,
i.e., press the Escape key then the x key. This makes ESC
the meta prefix. The combination M-C-x means ESC-Control-x,
or press the Escape key then hold the Control key while
pressing the x key.)
see also:
An Introduction to R Appendix C: The command-line editor.
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.html#The%
20command-line%20editor
Steve Dutky (sdutky at terpalum.umd.edu)