A lot of this depends on what context you are running R in, e.g.,
Windows console, Mac console, or command line in a unix-alike. Or
within ESS in emacs. Those are different interfaces supported by, to
some extent, different people, and are based on the underlying
capabilities provided by the operating system.
Have you yet encountered
options()$width
?
For example,
options(width=100)
will cause wrapping at 100, at least for certain kinds of output.
In an xterm shell running in an X windows context, I frequently use
setwid <- function ()
{
if (!interactive())
return(invisible(NULL))
scon <- pipe("stty -a")
stty <- scan(scon, what = "", sep = ";", quiet = T)
close(scon)
cstr <- stty[grep("columns", stty)]
options(width = as.numeric(gsub("[^0-9]", "", cstr, ignore.case = T)))
paste("width =", options()$width, "\n")
}
A function I wrote that resets the width option to match the window
widths, and therefore adjusts the wrapping after I resize a windwo.