help with help()

On Oct 28, 2010, at 1:20 PM, claudia tebaldi wrote:

Hi all

Just this morning I upgraded to R 2.12.0  (for Mac OS X 10.6.4).
All went well until I needed to run a help() or help.search() in my session,
which I'm running within Emacs (ESS 5.3.7).
Say I need help with the command 'density'. When I type

help(density)
or
?density

the ESS help buffer opens, it is titled *help[R](density)* but it contains
only a couple of lines saying, e.g.,

Error in help("density", htmlhelp = FALSE) :
unused argument(s) (htmlhelp = FALSE)

This is a problem only running R within emacs. The command help() works fine
if I run R at the command line in  a terminal window or if I use the
stand-alone R application.

Thank you in advance

Claudia

Put the following in your ~/.emacs file:

(setq inferior-ess-r-help-command "help(\"%s\", help_type=\"html\")\n")


You might also want to update to ESS 5.11:

http://ess.r-project.org/index.php?Section=download

or consider using Vincent Goulet's pre-packaged Emacs 23/ESS install:

 http://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca/en/ressources/emacs/mac