[R] Emacs & ESS under Windows

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 4 Mar 2001, Graham Smith wrote:

> In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.20010303215033.008fce80 at 162.38.183.200>
>
> Emmanuel,
>
> Although, this will be obvious to many, what are the advantages of
> running R in Emacs.

See the FAQ and rw-FAQ for some.

> As a windows, just learning Linux user, I have never used Emacs so i
> would be grateful for a run down on its benifits.

As for actually running R in emacs, I think the benefits are mainly
negative on Windows.  The things you can do in inferior-R-mode you can
often do better in the RGui console. (Many long-term users of ESS on Unix
I know almost never run R within it (since one can have multiple
windows).)  The benefits are most apparent to refugees from Unix forced to
use Windows.

The big advantage is that you can use a language sensitive editor, and the
same one across platforms.  Once you get used to a language-sensitive
editor you will find it points out most of your programming typos before
you ever run the code, e.g. by strange indenting appearing.  One thing I
find hard to cope with: emacs makes incredible use of control/shift/meta
keys (sometimes all at once), and those do differ in position by plaform.

Unfortunately Emmanual's instructions were for versions of Emacs and ESS
that are about two years' old.  I've sent some updates (and expect the
ESS/Emacs gurus have too).  For the record you want emacs 20.7 and ESS
5.1.18 (and certainly not as old as ESS 5.1.8 on Windows).

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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