R devel - Jan 2001 - minor problems (if problems at all): <ESC> in RGui; finding some (PR#799)

[These things don't seem to be of too great importance and may well not meet
the criteria of a "bug", but, for what it's worth,I thought
I'd submit them
to r-bugs anyway:]

This is the R version:
> version
         _              
platform i386-pc-mingw32
arch     x86            
os       Win32          
system   x86, Win32     
status                  
major    1              
minor    2.0            
year     2000           
month    12             
day      15             
language R 

This is what we noticed:

1) In RGui, when something is typed in a command line, pressing <ESC> in
R1.0.0 used to delete the written text and go to a blank new line; in R1.2.0
the text is not deleted and the user is prompted for new input in the same
line.
Of course, this is rather a "cosmetical" issue, but it might be worth
considering to change this behaviour back to what it used to be in R1.0.0?

2) It looks like if for some functions, their help pages cannot be accessed
directly via "?" or "help". For example, ?install.packages,
or ?setwd, won't
find the appropriate help page (I am using winhelp, to be specific).
This might be because e.g. "setwd" shares the same help file with
"getwd",
and it looks like only "getwd" is part of the index of the help
system.
Here, the same holds for R1.0.0.

Regards,
Heinrich Rinner.

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On Tue, 2 Jan 2001 H.RINNER@TIROL.GV.AT wrote:
> [These things don't seem to be of too great importance and may well not
meet
> the criteria of a "bug", but, for what it's worth,I thought
I'd submit them
> to r-bugs anyway:]
> 
> This is the R version:
> > version
>          _              
> platform i386-pc-mingw32
> arch     x86            
> os       Win32          
> system   x86, Win32     
> status                  
> major    1              
> minor    2.0            
> year     2000           
> month    12             
> day      15             
> language R 
> 
> This is what we noticed:
> 
> 1) In RGui, when something is typed in a command line, pressing <ESC>
in
> R1.0.0 used to delete the written text and go to a blank new line; in
R1.2.0
> the text is not deleted and the user is prompted for new input in the same
> line.
> Of course, this is rather a "cosmetical" issue, but it might be
worth
> considering to change this behaviour back to what it used to be in R1.0.0?
Nope, that is deliberate.  Use ^U to delete the text, if that is what you
want: Esc was never documented to do so.  The problem here is that some
other process (for example a GUI widget) might have written something to
the screen, and you don't want that deleted.

Moral: don't rely on undocumented side effects.
> 2) It looks like if for some functions, their help pages cannot be accessed
> directly via "?" or "help". For example,
?install.packages, or ?setwd, won't
> find the appropriate help page (I am using winhelp, to be specific).
> This might be because e.g. "setwd" shares the same help file with
"getwd",
> and it looks like only "getwd" is part of the index of the help
system.
> Here, the same holds for R1.0.0.
The critical thing here is that you are using winhelp, and that is
`rough'.  It works with all the four other help systems.  Can we persuade
you to move into the 21st century and used winhelp's replacement, CHTML?

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@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 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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