[ESS] Little troubles with Emacs for Windows and ESS

[Vincent Goulet]

Le ven. 22 janv. à 19:11, Paul Johnson a écrit :

> I'm running Vincent Goulet's Emacs enhances, which now has Emacs 23.1
> and ESS 5.7.1.  Today I've installed that with R on several windows
> systems, some XP, some Vista, some Win7.
> 
> On all of these systems, I have had the problem that, if you change
> the default install path for R from C:\Program Files to some place
> else (I prefer C:\ProgramFiles), then Emacs-ESS can't find Rterm.exe

ESS tries to find all versions of R on your system (in "usual" places) at Emacs startup; see the *Messages* buffer. Your location is probably not "standard" enough (or too sub-standard).

> and you have to edit the ess-site.el file (and delete ess-site.elc).

Please don't fiddle with ESS files! This is provided for in my distribution. In the message box after installation, you get the following:

* If R is not installed in the usual (default) location, it may be
  necessary to edit the paths in the site configuration file for ESS to
  find the R executable. This should also be true for any S-Plus
  installation. The site configuration file is accessed easily using the
  shortcut in the GNU Emacs program group of the Start menu.

and

The information above is available in file Updates-en.txt in the Emacs
installation folder.

In site-start.el (the "site configuration file"), you'll find this block of text:

;; Path to R executable. Uncomment and edit as needed if R is
;; installed in such an unusual place that ESS can't find it. (And
;; then keep updating with each R update!)
;(setq-default inferior-R-program-name
;              "c:/program files/r/r-2.7.1/bin/rterm.exe")

(Hum, I should update the release number!) Edit at will.

HTH   Vincent


> That happens even after we run the registry updater for Emacs.  That's
> just a little inconvenience we can work around. After a few
> go-arounds, I decided to stop telling people they can customize the
> path. I removed R and Emacs, installed both without changing any
> paths, and voila, and Emacs found Rterm every time.
> 
> But there are some functionality problems that seem severe.  First,
> Emacs cannot create a new file if you choose File->visit new file.  It
> is maddening. It will allow File -> save as, but no visit new file.
> 
> The other problems  are 'window manager' related problems.  For
> example, start Emacs with an R file, start the R session, and go into
> the R session and type "install.packages("gdata")"  R responds "select
> repository" but the repository selector does not pop up.  It doesn't
> give the tcl/tk chooser thing, and it doesn't give the old fashioned
> text list of repos.  On the other hand, if you run R interactively
> through Rgui, then install.packages does work.
> 
> Finally, while in Emacs, if you send a plot command to R, on SOME
> systems, the new Graph window opens BELOW the other windows.
> 
> I'm going to have to back away from Emacs for these Windows users.  I
> don't know what else to tell them they ought to use... :(
> 
> -- 
> Paul E. Johnson
> Professor, Political Science
> 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
> University of Kansas
> 
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