[R] productivity tools in R?

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Duncan Murdoch<murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
> On 7/3/2009 2:14 PM, cls59 wrote:
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch-2 wrote:
>>>
>>> The Windows GUI was written before the Mac GUI, and was written using a
>>> fairly strange toolkit, which are two reasons the Mac looks prettier. But
>>> the Windows GUI has a few advantages over the Mac:
>>> (snip)
>>>
>>>  You can copy from the console, prompts and all, and paste just the
>>> commands, to re-execute a sequence of commands.
>>>
>>
>> I recently noticed that the Mac GUI contains a way to do block selection-
>> so
>> you can select just the code you want to copy and exclude the prompts.
>> Just
>> hold down the option key and the text cursor will turn into a crosshair
>> which allows you to exclude the prompt column while you select.
>
> But doesn't that require you to edit out results?  The nice thing in the
> Windows Rgui is that it does everything for you.  So I can take a block of
> text like
>
>> x <- 1
>> x
> [1] 1
>> y <- 2
>> y
> [1] 2
>> x + y
> [1] 3
>
> and cut and "paste commands only" to re-execute it, without manually editing
> out the [1] 1, [1] 2, [1] 3 lines.  (Tony Plate contributed this code way
> back in R 1.9.0; thanks Tony!)
>
>> Even better, this behavior is somewhat universal as it works in other
>> applications such as the Terminal. I find it particularly useful for
>> copying
>> code out of Vim without getting Vim's line numbers wrapped up in my
>> selections.
>
> I think there's something of a culture clash here.  I consider it torture to
> use an editor that does that.  Line numbers are part of the frame around the
> text, they shouldn't be copied as part of the text.  (I was going to say I'd
> never use such an editor, but that's not true: sometimes I have no choice.)

At least on Windows if you turn line numbering on in vim (its off by default)
then selecting with the mouse and copying does not include them.