Thanks to Jim, I’ve been using R in the shell more and more – in concert with vi. It’s been fun, and nice to integrate my workflows all on the server (although I haven’t had to do much graphing yet – I’m sure I’ll start kvetching then and return to a nice gui).

One thing that has frustrated me is that large dumps of output – say, a list composed of elements that are 100 lines each – just whip past me without an ability to scroll through more slowly. The page function helps somewhat, but, it gets wonky when looking at S4 objects. I wanted something more efficient that used – something more…well, like more! So i peered into page, and whipped up a more function that some of you may find useful. Of course, I’m sure that there is a simpler way, but, when all else fails…write it yourself!

more<-function(x, pager=getOption("pager")){
        #put everything into a local file using sink
	file <- tempfile("Rpage.")
        sink(file)
        show(x)
        sink()
 
        #use file.show as you can use the default R pager
	file.show(file, title = "", delete.file = TRUE, pager = pager)
	}