mvbutils-package {mvbutils}R Documentation

How to use the mvbutils package

Description

Package mvbutils is a collection of utilities offering the following main features:

To get the full features of the mvbutils package (in particular, the project organization), you need to start R in the same directory every time (your "ROOT task"), and then switch to whichever project from inside R; see cd. Various options always need to be set to make fixr and the debug package work the way you want, so one advantage of the start-in-the-same directory-approach is that you can keep all your project-independent options(), library loads, etc., in a single .First function, called automatically when you start R. However, most features (including support for the debug package) may work even if you don't follow this suggestion.

Note1

On loading, the mvbutils package creates a new environment in the search path, called mvb.session.info, which stores some housekeeping information. mvb.session.info is never written to disk, and disappears when the R session finishes. [For Splus users: mvb.session.info is similar to frame 0.] You should never change anything in mvb.session.info by hand, but it is sometimes useful to look at some of the variables there:

Note2

On loading, the present version of package mvbutils compulsorily overwrites a few system functions: library, rbind.data.frame, lockEnvironment. By default, it also overwrites help, savehistory, loadhistory, save.image, difftime, +.POSIXt, and -.POSIXt. (The original version of routine xxx can always be obtained via base.xxx if you really need it.) The modifications should have [almost] no side-effects, and/but I hope to be able to avoid them altogether in future versions of R. Briefly:

Optional but recommended replacements are as follows:

If you are certain that you don't want the optional replacements, set options(mvbutils.replacements=FALSE) before loading mvbutils. However, this will prevent cd, fixr, and the flat-documentation help from working properly. You can also set the "mvbutils.replacements" option to a character vector comprising some or all of the above names.

After mvbutils has loaded, you can undo the modification of an individual function called xxx with assign.to.base( "xxx", base.xxx).

ESS.and.'mvbutils'

For ESS users: I'm not an Emacs user and so haven't tried ESS with the mvbutils package myself, but a read-through of the ESS documentation (as of ~2005) suggests that a couple of ESS variables may need changing to get the two working optimally. Please check the ESS documentation for further details on these points. I will update this helpfile when/if I receive more feedback on what works.

Display bugs: if you have a buggy Unix display where readline() always returns the cursor to the start of the line, overwriting any prompt, then try options( cd.extra.CR=TRUE).

Author(s)

Mark Bravington

See Also

cd, fixr, mlazy, flatdoc, dochelp, maintain.packages, source.mvb, mlocal, do.in.envir, foodweb, mvbutils.operators, mvbutils.utils, package debug


[Package mvbutils version 2.5.0 Index]