[ESS-bugs] ESS mode for Emacs

[Stephen Eglen]

hi Jean-Baptiste,

Coincendentally, last week I spent a few hours thinking about this very
issue, as I was taking a first look at making a version of ESS suitable
for the new Emacs packaging system, ELPA.   

At the time, I did conclude, like Rodney has already said, that keeping
things simple has its benefits -- ESS as written does not fit into the
standard autoload framework.  However, David Reitter (cc'ed) has managed
it for his aquamacs distribution, and I think I can see a way for this
to work in ELPA.  Given that ELPA is only for Emacs (not XEmacs as yet I
think), I would be happy with giving users an alternative way of (a)
installing ESS and (b) having it autoload, to save on start-up time.

My hope is that my fix would not change ess-site.el, nor require using
ELPA.  It would simply put all the autoloads in something like
ess-autoload.el and then the end user could add 

 (require 'ess-autoload)

rather than ess-site.  Then we don't interfere with the standard setup.




Your patch was not included in your email - could you resend it
(e.g. just to me or try again to the bugs list)?

Re: the *ESS* buffer, how much of a pain is it?  I recall also finding
it a bit offputting seeing this many years ago, and in all my years of
developing ESS, I for one have yet to find reason of inspecting it!  I
imagine other developers may differ -- but one thing I could suggest to
other core members is having a variable to inhibit this buffer?

Stephen


Jean-Baptiste Rouquier <jrouquie at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear ESS team,
> I am an emacs fan and infrequent user of ESS. As such, I have installed the
> debian package "ess" to conveniently write R scripts with emacs. But most of the
> time, I don't use the "*ESS*" buffer, so it is a bit irritating that it always
> appears in the buffer list and make it a bit cluttered each time I switch
> buffer.  Also, loading ESS everytime I launch emacs slightly increases the
> startup time.
> 
> The fix is to use the "autoload" emacs function, to load ESS just in time when
> needed, and not to use the "require" function. Most other emacs modes I use do
> this, so it seems to be the standard.
> I'm attaching a patch, this fix works, but I have not tested it extensively.
> 
> Bascally, I am suggesting to modify those lines from the ESS README about Unix
> Installation:
> 
>   2. Then, add the line
>           (require 'ess-site)
>      to `~/.emacs' and restart Emacs.
> 
> 
> Thanks a lot,
> Jean-Baptiste
> 
> 
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