[ESS] polymode, tangentially related to ESS

[Warth, Christopher S]

I want to reiterate - I admire and appreciate the ingenuity of Vitalie¹s
solution.  It is wonderful having ESS mode active in portions of my knitr
document.  I just wonder whether it is possible for emacs to associate a
major mode with any finer granularity than an entire buffer.

Maybe my experience is unusual, but three things make the current polymode
experience less than seamless for me.   The most obvious is perhaps the
least annoying, and that is the visual pollution of three buffer tabs
along the top of my emacs window - Foo.Rmd, Foo.Rmd[r], and
Foo.Rmd[fundamental].

More annoying is a jarring visual shift when I move the cursor from one
region to another - from markdown into an R region or vice versa.  It
looks like different font faces are set in the two modes and the switch is
quite evident when the buffers swap.  This is an example of the larger
visual shifts that happen as I use a thumb wheel to scroll through the
buffer.  Not only is the font face changing as the cursor is forced into
different regions, but the tabs at the top do a distracting dance as
different buffers become activated.  Maybe I can fix the font swapping by
judicious selection of major mode options?

And finally, under certain circumstances I have found it impossible to do
a sweep selection from one region to another.  This is very rare, and now
when I try to identify a specific scenario where this happens I cannot
reproduce it so maybe that one is all in my head.   Perhaps someone else
has seen that too?


- Chris
  cwarth at fhcrc.org

Aquamacs 3.0 GNU Emacs 24.3.50.2
(x86_64-apple-darwin13.0.0, NS apple-appkit-1265.00)
 of 2014-01-19 (Aquamacs-3.0) on watson