[R] Announce: edtdbg, integrating R's debug() with your text editor

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 07/12/2009 2:39 AM, Norm Matloff wrote:
> I've just developed edtdbg, a small package that integrates R's debug()
> with one's text editor.
> 
> Excerpt from the README file:
> 
>    Goal
>    
>    The debug() function in R is primitive.   My goal was to make it more
>    usable by integrating it with one's text editor.  Hence I wrote the
>    package here, edtdbg.  Its features include:
>    
>        * As one steps from line to line of code using the debugger, the
>          cursor in the editor will always follow, i.e. it will alway be on
>          whatever line the debugger is on.
>        * One can enable automatic display of user-specified variables.
>        * One can quickly and conveniently set "breakpoints."
>    
>    Currently the package is implemented only for Vim.  In addition, the
>    second and third features require the vim-r plugin for Vim.  Emacs/ESS
>    users should easily be able to convert the code; some of the machinery
>    is already in the code and in the instructions below.
> 
> I'm placing the current version of the package at:
> 
> http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/R/edtdbg/edtdbg.tar.gz
> 
> http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/R/edtdbg/edtdbg.zip
> 
> Please give me your comments.  I probably will upload to CRAN at some
> point, possibly after an ESS guru contributes the ESS code. :-)
> 
> A note on my Rdsm package for parallel R:  The new, much improved
> version is just about ready.  I'll be uploading Rdsm to CRAN very soon.

I haven't tried it yet, but it looks good from the writeup.  One 
suggestion:  you could use the setBreakpoint function to set 
breakpoints, rather than re-sourcing the breakpoint.  An advantage of 
this is that it lets you set breakpoints in packages.

Duncan Murdoch