Scrolling in Help System Doesn't Work
On 08/05/2011 11:30 PM, Marc Schwartz wrote:
On Aug 5, 2011, at 10:08 AM, Tom Callaway wrote:
On 08/05/2011 10:40 AM, Michael Smith wrote:
UsRs, When accessing help by typing, for example,
?read.table
the up and down keys do no longer scroll the help page. The page-up and page-down keys also do not work any longer. I can scroll down by pressing the d key, but I cannot scroll up by pressing the b key (although it should work according to the text displayed when you press the h key). I'm not sure whether this question is Fedora-specific, but since this list is most close to my configuration I first would like to know if this can be replicated (or maybe I'm missing something obvious).
By default, R uses "more" as a pager. You can see this by looking at /usr/lib[64]/R/etc/Renviron, specifically, the "PAGER" variable. If you wanted to switch to a pager that supports up-down scrolling, switch it to /usr/bin/less. ~tom
Just to add to Tom's reply, if you would prefer to use HTML help pages and view them in a browser, you can put: options(help_type="html") in your ~/.Rprofile See ?options and ?help Regards, Marc Schwartz
Thank you so much for your feedback, I appreciate it very much. The following commands changed the pager to less: # cd /usr/lib64/R/etc/ # cp Renviron Renviron_backup # sed -i 's_/bin/more_/usr/bin/less_g' Renviron On my old F13 box, R 2.13.0 still uses "less" by default. Since "less" is often regarded as a more sophisticated version of "more", I wonder why this change has been made. Thanks, Michael