Searching R Help Files

Architect allows you to search the help files from all installed R packages. To open the R Help search view, type Ctrl + h, then click on the R Help tab.

This is useful for finding packages and functions related to a given topic or keyword. For example, we may be interested in finding help pages that relate to ‘geom’. A quick search shows that 11 of our installed packages contain help pages related to this query.

By clicking on a package, we can see all pages from that package related to our search query. Clicking on a page opens the corresponding R Help page.

Help pages for base R packages are indexed the first time you run Architect. For other packages, help pages are automatically index upon package installation. Indexing displays the following messages in the Console.

Additional Search Features

You can specify the scope of your search via the Search in field. Selecting Complete Document may be needed for many queries. In our previous example, searching for “geom” in only selected fields yielded only three packages (and only two ggplot2 pages!).

Although not often utilized by package developers, searches can be done for predefined keywords such as “htest” (hypothesis test). The terms are available by clicking the Select… button.

Finally, if you have installed other versions of R, you can pick the R installation to search via the Selected Configuration dropdown menu.