Rendering development documentation

[vikasrawal]

I am building an R library. The documentation files, created by Roxygen2, are in man/*.Rd. When I am working in RStudio or even the R console in the terminal, I can use ?myfunction and help(myfunction) to render development documentation after I have loaded the package using devtools::load_all(). But the same does not work when I start R in emacs/ess.

With an R session running in emacs/ess, I get the message: "ess-r-help--build-help-command--unqualified: Can’t find documentation for ‘myfunction’ ".

Is this a known problem? What could be the issue?

Thanks

[lionel-]

It's a known problem, that's because ESS catches ? inputs to run its own doc rendering method, so the shim installed on the search path by devtools never has a chance to run.

You can work around by wrapping the operator in backticks to prevent ESS from detecting a help command:

`?`(myfunction)