Hi Russ,

I may be misunderstanding what you are suggesting, but if not, the ability to 
place:

  options(show.signif.stars = FALSE)

in ~/.Rprofile has been around for years. I have been using R since circa 2001 
and have had that in my ~/.Rprofile for as long as I can remember. 

I would have to defer to others as to when that may have been added as feature, 
if not available back then.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz

> On May 10, 2026, at 4:23 PM, Lenth, Russell V via R-devel 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I'm following up on a thread from 7 years ago (Mar 2019) where there are 
> several arguments -- some of them passionate -- for and against having the 
> 'show.signif.stars' option default to TRUE. You can look back in the archives 
> (https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/) under "default for 'signif.stars'", 
> starting 27 March 2019 to see what was said. You may also want to look at the 
> "Regression stars" thread initiated by Frank Harrell starting 7 Feb 2013.
> 
> Clearly, there is a long-standing debate on this issue. I'm writing to 
> suggest a more modest response than changing the default for 
> 'show.signif.stars': Instead, consider making 'show.signif.stars' a 
> configuration option along with 'papersize' and others that some users will 
> want to change. The default .Rprofile script starts with "# Things you might 
> want to change" - and it could be added there. I think this file is 
> initialized with some modal dialogs in a new installation of R, and it would 
> be good to add it there too.
> 
> Why do this? Because there are a lot of users out there who strongly object 
> to significance stars, just like there are a lot of people who use 
> letter-sized paper. They are your colleagues, even though you may disagree 
> with them; and it gives them a more visible way of not having those asterisks 
> cluttering their results.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Russ Lenth
> Professor Emeritus
> University of Iowa, USA

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