Question

I have been using R in the terminal window for Ubuntu. Recently I discovered the fix function in R, which I could use to edit my function. However, whenever I use the fix function, it opens up an editor (VIM) and I can use that to write my function. Then I type “wq” to save the work, however when I type the name of the function, it shows that there weren’t any edits which were made to the function. Why does this happen?

Answer 1

In order to use the editing functionality, make sure you have either

• the default editor installed (do eg grep EDITOR /etc/R/Renviron)

• or set the EDITOR environment variable to a different editor you prefer,

• or at runtime set options("editor"=....) to what you need.

Now, for the fix() function in particular, note this hint in its manual page:

 ‘fix’ invokes ‘edit’ on ‘x’ and then assigns the new (edited)
 version of ‘x’ in the user's workspace.

So if the change “vanishes”, maybe you were editing an object which is not yours. Start with something simple, edit it and see if that persists. Along the lines of

R> hw <- function() cat("Hello, world\n")
R> fix(hw)                 ## editing, adding 'new'
R> hw()
Hello, new world
R>