[R] Mac Text editors

[David Winsemius]

On Sep 26, 2012, at 5:48 PM, Steven Wolf wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I've recently moved from using a windows machine to a Mac (some might call it an upgrade, others not…I'll let you be the judge).  Once I started using Notepad ++ on my windows machine, I really began to like it.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure what the free text editor options are for the Mac (Notepad ++ is windows only).  I've dabbled with Linux before and used Emacs/ESS there.  However, I seem to remember fighting pretty hard to make that work and the OSX file structure isn't that intuitive to me yet.  (For example, where is my .emacs file?)  
> 
> What text editors are best for the Mac, keeping in mind that I'm probably going to use them via the command line interface (e.g. X11 or Terminal).

Probably best in the future to post to R-SIG-Mac.

The editor in the Mac-GUI works well. Has parenthesis, bracket and ellipsis matching which is very helpful. Also tab-completion thanks to the continuing effors to Simon Urbanek and Hans-Joerg Bibiko and probably others whose contributions are too subtle for for my aging brane. You can also get R-specific macro behaviors with TextWrangler. The default editor defined by options() is "vi" which has many powerful features as well. (I do not think I am interacting with 'vi' inside the editing panels that pop up from the GUI, although I would be happy to be corrected on this point.) Emacs is a UNIX standard and the Mac is yet-another-Unix-boxen.

Many Mac users are also happy with R-Studio.

-- 

David Winsemius, MD
Alameda, CA, USA