[ESS-bugs] ... 'edit(vignette("zoo"))' ...

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "FrL" == Friedrich Leisch <friedrich.leisch at stat.uni-muenchen.de>
>>>>>     on Wed, 24 May 2006 10:39:28 +0200 writes:

>>>>> On Tue, 23 May 2006 11:07:32 +0200,
>>>>> Martin Maechler (MM) wrote:

>>>>> "tony" == A J Rossini <blindglobe at gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Mon, 22 May 2006 16:26:40 +0200 writes:

    tony> The usual questions: #1 - does it still happen when
    tony> you upgrade?  (I think it will, but you are many
    tony> versions behind).

    >> (yes it does still happen, but yes you *should* upgrade
    >> ESS)

    tony> #2 - Why are you editing from an R function rather
    tony> than just loading in the file?

    >> Because too many people in too many places / documents
    >> tell you to do edit(vignette("<vignettename>"))

    >> and say that it is a bug of ESS that it doesn't work.

    >> I have found it very unfortunate that those people didn't
    >> think a bit longer,

    FrL> Being one of those people (and the first one as author
    FrL> of edit.vignette) I must reject the subtle suggestion
    FrL> that I never thought about it.

Please apologize, Fritz, if I made it seem I meant you.
I rather meant comments people made in mailing lists and I think
in bioconductor courses / documents.

    >> but OTOH, I think we (ESS developers) can and should do
    >> something about it ... after all we have the powerful
    >> emacs machine to our disposal.

    >> What should we do?

    >> In R, help(vignette) contains

    >>>> The edit method extracts the R code from the vignette
    >>>> to a temporary file and opens the file in an editor.

    >> and the 'edit.vignette' method is a very simple function
    >> :

    >> function (name, ...)  { f <- paste(tempfile(name$topic),
    >> ".R", sep = "") Stangle(name$file, output = f, quiet =
    >> TRUE) file.edit(file = f, ...)  }

    >> and file.edit() really just uses getOption("editor")
    >> which is "emacsclient" in ESS for GNU emacs and which
    >> seems to badly fail here for some reason --- even for me
    >> who has the equivalent of M-x server-start somewhere in
    >> my Emacs / ESS initialization --- just giving
    >>>> emacsclient: connect: Connection refused
    >> or in further attempts it complains about an already
    >> running emacsclient.


    FrL> edit(vignette(...)) works fine for me, the only thing
    FrL> that may be hard to find out for users is that you have
    FrL> to press C-c C-c in the R buffer to get back to the
    FrL> prompt (by default R waits for the file to be closed),
    FrL> but once you have done that you can edit the vignette
    FrL> code, send it line by line to R etc.

Thanks for that: This is interesting to hear. I used to use
the emacsclient quite a bit for a while in the past but for some
reasons hadn't done so anymore in recent years.
However, IIRC,  edit(vignette(..))  had never worked for me (*)
And I never started looking into it (because I typically worked
with the *.Rnw file anyway) till yesterday when I wrote
that e-mail.

(*) Now that I try it at home, 
it works fine.  So it's just at work where my Emacs setup seems
screwed.

By the way, for me (and I think by default), it's  'C-x #' and
not C-c C-c {which would be much easier for "users" I think}
that is needed to leave the emacsclient "server-edit" mode,
isn't it ?


    >> So I think there's a definitive emacsclient problem at
    >> least with R's internal way of calling it --- any insight
    >> here ?  Otherwise, we probably need to carry the problem
    >> to R-devel.

    >> If we (R-core) would allow to use 'quiet = FALSE' in the
    >> above Stangle() statement, the user at least would see
    >> something like
    >> ------------------------------------------------
    >> Writing to file /tmp/RtmppGX7Wj/grid625558ec.R
    >> ------------------------------------------------
    >> and could just manually open that in Emacs.

    FrL> No problem with that, but I think that is not the main
    FrL> issue, file.edit() on general does not exactly what I
    FrL> would expect under ESS and that is at least unfortunate
    FrL> given that we are inside the best editor available.

    FrL> E.g., we should fix (in R) that one can only open one
    FrL> file at a time in ESS, and R should not wait for the
    FrL> file to be closed but be more like on windows (shudder,
    FrL> did I write that?), where you can open multiple files.
    FrL> Waiting is fine if you run in an xterm and open vi
    FrL> (which captures the terminal anyway), but is stupid in
    FrL> ESS.

That sounds reasonable, and good to wish.  
Yes, contrary to other edit*() functions that *return*
something,  file.edit() really should behave  ``asynchronously''
to R.

Martin