Message-ID: <4E3CBB79.4040603@gmail.com>
Date: 2011-08-06T03:56:41Z
From: Michael Smith
Subject: Scrolling in Help System Doesn't Work
In-Reply-To: <57C140E9-CEA6-43B1-9A44-C3E1C0FD230A@me.com>
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