the require works when the ess is installed in the right place (under emacs/site-lisp/, iirc). the load-file always works. Sent from my iPhone On Jun 21, 2012, at 18:12, Ross Boylan wrote: > On 6/20/2012 8:35 PM, Richard M. Heiberger wrote: >> >> ESS finds R automatically when it is put in the default location >> c:/Program Files/R/ >> >> It is up to you to tell ESS where R is if it is anywhere else. >> See the paragraph in ess-site.el that contains the line >> ;;(setq-default inferior-R-program-name "C:\\Program Files\\R\\R-2.5.0\\bin\\Rterm.exe") >> Installation instructions for Windows are very simple. >> Put ESS somewhere and in site-start.el tell ESS where with a line like this >> >> (load-file "/PATH/TO/THIS/FILE/ess-site.el") > Hmm, I used (require 'ess-site) as advised in some docs (for recent emacs). > > Anyway, it would be good to have the instructions on the download page, or at least somewhere it points to. Probably with a note that you may need to tell it where your stat programs are. > > Ross >> >> >> On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 8:54 PM, Ross Boylan wrote: >> I recently had Windows 7 installed on a computer, and then R 2.15 and emacs 24.1. ESS 12,04-4 is now working, but I thought I'd mention a couple of rough spots. My hope is that this report might lead to some improvements in the installation experience and documentation. >> >> I've installed and used ESS before on a number of linux and windows systems. I think I've often used Vincent Goulet's packages for Windows, but since I already had emacs I didn't this time. >> >> First, I tried using emacs' new package management system, but ESS wasn't in it. You might consider using that distribution channel. >> >> Second, when I went to download the file from http://ess.r-project.org/index.php?Section=download it was hard to find instructions. The first paragraph says "To run ESS in Emacs you have to first download the compressed eLisp source files and install them according to the following instructions." But there aren't really any instructions on the page. Eventually I tried the link to the ESS manual at the bottom, although the description "Instructions on how to retrieve ESS in particular or how to work with Subversion in general can be found in the following documents:" was not too inviting. First, it didn't say which was which (it's pretty easy to guess, but why add friction? The git docs are clearly marked off); more importantly, my problem was not how to retrieve the code but how to install it. After some searching around in the manual I found the relevant section, which is also in the README file at the top of the directory of the unpacked zip. >> >> Finally, when I followed the instructions to install, I got to the 2nd step and was happy about the "you're done." When I tried to start R it didn't work ("rterm not found"). Only then I realized I did not have an ESS buffer, and even the instructions after the second step did not say how to deal with rterm trouble, except to email this list. A little more searching solved that too, although the instructions contain one more pitfall, I think. The paragraph above the one with (setq inferior-R-program-name "...") ends with the advice to "make sure to use backslashes, '\' since Windows requires them." Despite that, the setq example uses forward slashes and I suspect backslashes would be interpreted as escapes by elisp and fail, unless doubled. >> >> I'm not sure if ESS is supposed to be able to find R automatically; I recall some discussion about that quite awhile ago. FWIW, my installation was at c:/Users/rdboylan/Documents/R/R-2.15.0/bin/i386/Rterm.exe. That's where the system adminstrator put it. >> >> Thanks for ESS! >> >> I don't need any particular response. >> >> Ross >> >> ______________________________________________ >> ESS-help@r-project.org mailing list >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/ess-help >> > [[alternative HTML version deleted]]