Sharing Emacs ESS configs

2018/06/08

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.

ess

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?