[ESS] viewing data - how do you do it?

[Sven Hartenstein]

Dear ess-helpers,

I lived with using View(data) for ages now (as I don't need it much) but
would like to find a more elegant and feature-rich way of looking into a
dataframe or tibble.

Question 1: How do you do it? What way would you recommend?

Today I realised that I might like DT::datatable() (showing data as a
HTML table in a browser) and defined a function v() to call
DT::datatable() with some nice options. Now, I would like to call my
function from my R code buffer by "M-x"ing an emacs function, that asks
for an object (the dataframe) (with autocompletion) and sends
"v(CHOOSENOBJECT)" to the R process.

Question 2: How can I achieve this? Is there an ESS function, that helps
me to run a specified R function on an existing R object (which I would
like to choose interactively)?


The emacs packages ess-view-data also looks promising to me. (It might
however irritate my colleagues who are used to GUI elements when looking
at data together.)

Question 3: Do you recommend ess-view-data?


You might think "Try things out and use whatever feels best to you", but
I would appreciate any related recommendations and tips based on your
experience.

Thank you,

Sven