R devel - Jul 2011 - Front ends handling help.search() results?

Which front ends process the help.search() results to produce nice 
clickable lists, instead of the simple text display that's the default?  
I know the R.app gui on  Mac OS does; are there others?

I'm asking because one of the decisions made when R Core met in Vienna 
was to allow vignettes to be returned as results of help.search().  All 
of those front ends will need to be able to handle this.

Duncan Murdoch

On Friday 29 July 2011, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> Which front ends process the help.search() results to produce nice
> clickable lists, instead of the simple text display that's the default?
> I know the R.app gui on  Mac OS does; are there others?
RKWard does, too. (More precisely: It has a UI for searching help files, which 
relies on help.search()).
> I'm asking because one of the decisions made when R Core met in Vienna
> was to allow vignettes to be returned as results of help.search().  All
> of those front ends will need to be able to handle this.
Will this affect the structure of the hsearch class?

Currently, our implementation for showing an item from the result list is to 
simply call help(help_type="html"), appropriately. What are the
implications
of vignettes for the behavior of help(), if any (with or without specification 
of help_type)?

Regards
Thomas
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The R.rsp package has a proof of concept page:

1. library("R.rsp")
2. browseRsp(path="/R/help/")
3. At the bottom, there is a "help.search" form.  Type in search term,
e.g. "svd".

This is all web browser based, so it should be able to handle compiled
vignettes (as long as there are valid paths/URL paths).

/Henrik

On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 11:11 AM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Which front ends process the help.search() results to produce nice
clickable
> lists, instead of the simple text display that's the default? ?I know
the
> R.app gui on ?Mac OS does; are there others?
>
> I'm asking because one of the decisions made when R Core met in Vienna
was
> to allow vignettes to be returned as results of help.search(). ?All of
those
> front ends will need to be able to handle this.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
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