[R] Re: Using XEmacs and ESS with R for MS/Windows

Lu Chi-Hsien Joseph
Mon, 25 Nov 2002 17:17:29 -0000

Dear Prof. Fox,

Thanks very much for providing such a great setup for Windows users
to use ESS + XEmacs!
This shall not only speed up the productivity of programming and
using R, but also extremely attractive to potential users,
particularly to students in my 'statistical methods',
'reliability analysis', and 'programming design' classes.

Frankly, I have used your setup, found in R-mailing-list mentioned
by someone's post of question, for about a month.
I am very pleased to find that you add an R submenu to the ESS menu,
along with an Exit R/XEmacs submenu to the File menu, and available
of key-combinations for cut, copy and paste.

However, I got the following problem and wandered about two things
of installing XEmacs in Section 3 of your document.

1) After installing new version of fox-ESS-config.zip,
   there is no action when <Enter> pressed in the lower window.
   (return to confirm) is message appeared in the Minibuffer
   when I choose Send command from iESS menu.

   This did not happened to the previous version.

   I noticed the mode line of the lower window shows
   (iESS PenDel Font [R]: run)
   rather than
   (iESS Font [R]: run) as in your document.

   This extra 'PenDel' also appears in the mode line of the upper
window.

   And those paste line, function, ..., all won't actually execute
   whatever in the upper window.

   This affects is I have to use Ctrl+Alt+Del to kill 'Rterm' then
   to close XEmacs under my Win98.

2) Later I found that after kill 'Rterm' with Ctrl+Alt+Del, do
   M-x R in the minibuffer to invoke R, then everything works.

3) XEmacs package xemacs-i586-pc-win32 is required to download,
   but not mentioned in page 10 of your document.

4) Your configuration seems required XEmacs at least 21.4.9 version,
   however this seems not mentioned in the document.

5) I found the init.el file in fox.ess.config.exe and fox.ess.config.zip
   having different date, one is 11/23 and another is 11/24.
   Any difference?

Again, thanks very much for making ESS + XEmacs so convenient and
powerful to use!

BTW, your book "An R and S-Plus Companion to Applied Regression" is
also great.

Best regards,

C. Joseph Lu
Department of Statistics
National Cheng-Kung University
Tainan, TAIWAN