As an Emacs ESS lover, I really push the idea of Miles McBain. He aims to gather ESS configurations contributed by #rstats community members so that new ESS users can onboard easily.
I still remember my early days trying to turn Emacs into a fully functional IDE for R programming as a replacement for RStudio. I did have to search for a lot of Emacs init files, just to find out about functionalities equivalent to RStudo’s ones, namely the Knit button, syntax highlighting for RMarkdown document, etc. It was a frustrating experience, honestly.
The fact is that, while ESS is a great package for coding R (and other statistical languages), it’s not yet a friendly environment to beginners. This is, indirectly, said by ESS’s authors:
Although all users of these statistical analysis programs are welcome to apply ESS, advanced users or professionals who regularly work with text-based statistical analysis scripts, with various statistical languages/programs, or with different operating systems might benefit from it the most.
There’re many ways to improve the situation, and McBain’s project is definitely a good first step. Kudos to him.
PS: Guess who made that first PR?