setwidth no longer on CRAN

[Jakson Alves de Aquino]

Dear all,

People running R in a terminal emulator (on Linux, Mac OS X and other Unix systems) noted that setwidth is no longer on CRAN.

I asked for the removal of the package from CRAN because there was a change in R code and setwidth stopped working. R now catches the SIGWINCH signal that is sent to applications when the terminal is resized. So, the signal no longer reaches setwidth. R does call the readline funtion rl_resize_terminal(), that is, it adjusts the input to the current number of columns, but it does not call options(width = number_of_columns) as setwidth did.

Perhaps this feature could be implemented directly in R if someone requested it to the R Core Team.

The workaround is to run R in a Neovim buffer (built-in terminal emulator) because Nvim-R constantly checks the terminal size and sends the command options(width=number_of_columns) to nvimcom whenever necessary.

-- 

Jakson Aquino

[daan...@gmail.com]

Thank you for describing this issue. Indeed, setwidth no longer automatically adjusts the number of columns of R output to the width of my terminal.

I added a function to my .Rprofile to more easily adjust the width manually:

setwidth_fun <- function(howWide=Sys.getenv("COLUMNS"))
options(width=as.integer(howWide))
makeActiveBinding("sw", setwidth_fun, baseenv())

as suggested here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/1173161.

[joss....@gmail.com]

I know that this is a very old thread, but I came across this whilst looking how to handle this.

As a result of the discussion here: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/patch-automatically-adjust-width-option-when-terminal-is-resized-td4745068.html it seems that you can now set "options(setWidthOnResize = TRUE)" and R will behave as expected (on modern installs).