R command history -- can it be like Matlab's?
Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
A patch to do this was posted on 2007-09-29 by Glenn Davis. Some people not addicted to Matlab find the behaviour very inconvenient and prefer the getline/readline behaviour (triggered by ^R/^S) of Rterm and R on Unixen.
Now that you've mentioned readline, it doesn't behave exactly the same in Bash and R: if you press ctrl-r and then ctrl-c in Bash, it breaks the search and you go back to the prompt as normal. In R on Linux (all versions I've tried, 2.2 to 2.7.1), doing that returns you to the prompt but you can't type anything, and the input buffer retains the text from the search, so pressing enter makes the historical command run again. Try this: > ls() character(0) [ctrl-r] (reverse-i-search)`l': ls() [ctrl-c, then enter] > ls() character(0)
Gad Abraham Dept. CSSE and NICTA The University of Melbourne Parkville 3010, Victoria, Australia email: gabraham at csse.unimelb.edu.au web: http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~gabraham