R unix terminal pager

Question

I'm using R on OS X 10.6 and I prefer the unix console to the R.app for my work. If I issue a help command eg ?print the help content opens through a pager (i tried most and less), which however then hides out the content if I exit it bringing me back to the R input line.

What I really want is that the pager output stays on the screen even after I exit it back to R (hitting q).

I get this desired behaviour on other Readline-based Cli like psql for example, but not on R. Any hints on how this gets configured would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The console pager that R uses can be set with the options function. With less, the -X option suppresses the terminal clearing at exit. So, if the less binary is located in "/bin" (not sure where it's located in OS X), this should work:

> options(pager="/bin/less -X")

If you want this to be the default behavior every time you start R, you can place the above command in your ~/.Rprofile file, which is run automatically at startup.

Alternatively, you can set a export LESS=-XF in ~/.bashrc and this will have an effect across all programs that use less as a pager. The F option would further exit straight away if the content is less than a page, which I find quite useful.