Question: savehistory built-in R function does not seem to work for IR console -- is this inevitable/to be expected?

[krinsman]

To clarify, saying "IR console", I mean the result of pressing the "R" button underneath "Console" in the Jupyter Lab launcher interface. I would attach a screenshot of that interface to be entirely unambiguous, but that seems to not be supported anymore in GitHub issues?

Silly MWE:

R version 4.0.3 (2020-10-10)

[1]: 4+4
     8

[2]: 29-2
     27

[3]: 8**2
     64

[4]: savehistory("test.txt")
    Error in .External2(C_savehistory, file): no history available to save
    Traceback:
    
    1. savehistory("test.txt")

Basically what I was hoping for when trying to use savehistory was an R language/IR kernel equivalent of the IPython %notebook magic which has proven useful for me when working in Python.

This question seems similar to another issue about saving the notebook to HTML and another question which seems to be referring to the command line version of the IR console, but I'm not sure whether that issue refers to history of a single session (all I'm interested in here, like if kernel is shut down, flush the history, fine by me) or to the input history from all sessions from all time (e.g. like a log file), which is what it sounds like to me based on this comment.

Anyway just wanted to know whether I should work only in R notebooks in case the session turns out to be useful and I want to save its output for later, or if there's a hidden trick like the %notebook (or I guess using savehistory from the command line -- I've almost always used R via IRkernel so have little understanding of how "raw R" works, to be honest).