[Rd] R readline not honoring RCustomCompletion

Prof Brian Ripley ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Thu Aug 12 10:04:35 CEST 2010


And where did you find the documentation that it should?  Not in the R 
sources AFAICS ....

The readline documentation suggests that applications should set their 
name by rl_readline_name.  That will be done and documented as from R 
2.12.0, but the application name is 'R', not 'RCustomCompletion' -- 
and the only example in any of the postings you cite is nothing to do 
with completion.

On Mon, 9 Aug 2010, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:

> This issue has been brought at least twice in R-help:

Which was of course the wrong list.

> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2008-September/173828.html
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2009-May/197360.html
>
> Looking at the source in src/unix/sys-std.c, it seems that the definition
> of rl_readline_name as "RCustomCompletion" is made after the readline
> library has been initialized and the ~/.inputrc file has been read.
> Typing "C-x C-r" at the R prompt makes the definitions under "$if
> RCustomCompletion" work, but this is not what one expects the R users to
> do.
>
> Attached below is the trivial patch that seems to fix the problem.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Rafael Laboissiere
>

-- 
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



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