[R] Re: [R-gui] Editor in R

[Duncan Murdoch]

On Wed, 07 Apr 2004 13:33:17 -0700, Bob Cain
<arcane at arcanemethods.com> wrote :

>
>Søren Højsgaard wrote:
>
>> Dear all,
>> I have used R (Windows) for teaching statistics to agronomists and biologists - and they love R!! Yet there is one immediate short coming of R: The lack of an integrated editor. A plain editor (e.g. similar to notepad in windows) in which people can write their code, highlight the piece of code they wish to "submit" and then press a single key to have it pasted into R. 
>> 
>> For the audience I have in mind, using emacs is way too complicated. WinEdt with the R-extension is probably also too difficult for them (though I have not tried), and at it certainly would move the focus away from statistics to get these technical things "up-and-running". 
>> 
>> If I knew how to make such a simple editor within R (as an add-on package) then I would do it - but this goes way beyond my capabilities. I would therefore like to encourage anyone in the GUI group with such technical skills to make such an editor. It would be appreciated by many R-beginners...
>> 
>
>I'm on a PC and have VIM, a VI clone that I love.  Is it
>possible and relatively easy to replace the Emacs editor
>with one like that which you already have?

Does VIM have a way to run a program that uses stdin, stdout and
stderr, capturing the input and output?  That's how ESS does it in
Emacs.  If so, then it could run Rterm that way, and handle the
console display itself.  You might want to run using the --ess command
line option (but you'll have to check the source code to see exactly
what it does, I forget).

Duncan Murdoch