[R] Best R text editors?

[Vitalie S.]

On Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:25:38 +0200, Jim Lemon <jim at bitwrit.com.au> wrote:

> Liviu Andronic wrote:
>> Could someone give a brief and subjective overview of ESS. I notice
>> that many people use it, and many describe it as the tool for the
>> power user. As far as I'm concerned, I've once again looked at Emacs
>> (after couple of years) and I still don't feel like using it for my
>> editing purposes.
>>
> Hi Liviu,
> I was going to steer clear of this one, as my favorite editor (NEdit)  
> has become mildly incompatible with my favorite window manager (KDE) on  
> my favorite operating system (Linux) and I have sadly taken to using  
> KWrite, hoping that things will get better. Still, one must not get  
> stuck in a rut, so I decided to download Emacs and try it again. Twenty  
> four megabytes poorer, I find that things are much the same. Emacs still  
> has that annoying trait of being determinedly incompatible with anything  
> else, even if the conventions are quite sensible. Thus most of my  
> keyboard shortcuts that I use all the time just don't work. Do I want to  
> learn Emacs shortcuts so that I will hit the wrong key shortcuts on all  
> my other applications? No way.

Just customize Emacs to use your shortcuts - a couple of hours and you are  
done. Probably your "standard shortcuts" are all already there (CUA mode  
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CuaMode)

> As far as the connection to R goes, I tried unsuccessfully some time  
> back to write a general purpose function that would connect any editor  
> that could send a block of text back to R and have it evaluated.

Emacs has dozens of ways to send text to process and much much more - it  
will take you years to implement a fraction of that by yourself. Don't  
rack our finger, move to ESS!

Vitalie

> I see that more and more editors are being added to the rarefied list  
> that can do this, and hope that one day this apparently solveable  
> problem will be solved and R users can use the editor that they prefer.
>
> Jim
>
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