R help - Jul 2006 - R 2.3.1 on OSX: scrolling command line

Dear all,

I am running R in the terminal (X11) of Mac OS. Recently, I upgraded 
my OS from 10.3 to 10.4 and installed version  2.3.1 of R. Since 
then, R has the annoying behaviour of scrolling long command lines to 
the left, rather than breaking the line and showing the entire 
command on several lines. Starting R with '--no-readline' fixes the 
problem, but at the price of losing command line history and working 
arrow keys.

Is there a way to way to define what R does to long command lines?

Many thanks for your help, Max
-- 



___________________________________________________________
Max Reuter

Departement of Biology
University College London
The Galton Laboratory
4 Stephenson Way
London NW1 2HE, UK

Phone: +44-20-76795095			 Fax: +44-20-76795052

On Wed, 5 Jul 2006, Max Reuter wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I am running R in the terminal (X11) of Mac OS. Recently, I upgraded
> my OS from 10.3 to 10.4 and installed version  2.3.1 of R. Since
> then, R has the annoying behaviour of scrolling long command lines to
> the left, rather than breaking the line and showing the entire
> command on several lines. Starting R with '--no-readline' fixes the
> problem, but at the price of losing command line history and working
> arrow keys.
>
> Is there a way to way to define what R does to long command lines?
It isn't R!  This is a function of readline and the terminal, not of R 
which has not yet seen the line.

What is likely is that your R install (how did you install it?) is built 
against a readline clone (I believe there is one from NetBSD? in MacOS 
10.4) rather than GNU readline, and the fix is likely to be to install GNU 
readline and then rebuild R from the sources.

-- 
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

Try
   M-x toggle-truncate-lines
If that solves the problem, you can add it to your site-start.el

Rich