Readline in vi mode on OSX
On Tue, 10 Mar 2009, Dave Murray-Rust wrote:
Hi All, This is a slightly arcane question, but I'm wondering if anyone else uses vi mode with R? On my platform, across several versions, there is some broken behaviour. When executing commands like 'df)' (to delete up to the next bracket) the cursor moves to the next ), but nothing is deleted. In general, many delete/replace commands work only as movement. Has anyone else come across this, and if so, did you find a fix? The same commands work correctly on the command line, so I'm assuming the R CLI has it's own built in version of readline, which is causing problems.
Or your assumption that it is GNU readline is causing you problems.
I'm currently running R2.8.1 on OSX 10.5.6, but the bug has been there for both R and OSX upgrades. It isn't present on Linux.
The editing library on OS X is not GNU readline. By 'on the command line' I guess you mean in bash, which does include GNU readline. (Earlier versions of OS X did not use bash.) If you want GNU readline, the solution it to build R to use it. This is described in the R for Mac OS X FA!, section 2.1.3. BTW, it is common policy on help lists not to answer questions about topics in the FAQ, and the R posting guide asked you to check that first. Especially when asked on the wrong list: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2009-March/190505.html
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595