[R] command completion?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 5/10/2006 2:52 PM, Robert Citek wrote:
> Does R have command or object name completion?
> 
> R has several functions of modern shells built into it e.g. history  
> mechanism, command-line editing, emacs key bindings.  However, it  
> doesn't seem to have command or object name completion.  For example,  
> in bash I can begin typing a command and then press the tab key to  
> have the shell fill in the rest of the command (works for environment  
> variables and filenames, too).  Does command completion exist and I'm  
> not using it correctly or don't have it turned on, or is it really  
> not there?

It's not there, because some of the shells that run R supply it. I don't 
use one, but I think a couple of the popular ones are ESS and the Mac OS 
GUI.

It would be a nice addition to the Windows GUI, but I don't know anyone 
who is working on it.  I don't think it would be a welcome change to the 
console versions; some of them use readline's filename completion which 
would almost certainly be broken by this.  Others need to run under ESS.

Duncan Murdoch