![]() These include things like git, hunspell, & pandoc. There are a few other command line tools, not included with Rtools, that you may want to install, eventually. For now, it's enough to know that Rtools contains Windows versions of most unix/linux command line tools you will need to complete your Emacs experience. ![]() But, those are side issues for present purposes. Rtools is a toolchain designed to allow you to compile R from source (you don't want to do that), or install R packages from source rather than pre-compiled binaries this is handy sometimes because not all R packages are available in pre-compiled form. If you're reading this, it's likely that you are an R user, but even if not, an easy way to get a set of these tools working on Windows is to install Rtools ( ) and add it (e.g., 'c:/rtools40/usr/bin') to your computer's PATH environment variable. Much Emacs functionality depends on the availability of Unix/Linux like command line tools. Everything below assumes you are using the Goulet distribution of GNU Emacs, but most of it will apply more generally. (If you want an opinionated Emacs distribution, you might look into Doom Emacs: ). The fact that Goulet's distributions are built on garden variety GNU Emacs means that you get all the benefit of the most widely used Emacs distribution. His distributions are fairly unopinionated, being minimal modifications to the stock GNU Emacs distribution. I find using Goulet's pre-compiled version of GNU Emacs simplifies things greatly when working on Windows. These notes are geared toward helping a potential new user of Emacs/ESS with R to to navigate some of those difficulties. In the end, you're the only one who can decide if Emacs is right for you. You will need to do some work in order to arrive at a configuration that works well for you. There are many many options and the out-of-the-box settings are probably not ideal for anyone. You should be aware that using Emacs really requires a tinkerers mind-set. But, I still find Emacs to be the better tool for me, over-all. I've revisited RStudio periodically in the intervening years, and it has matured quite a bit. When RStudio came out in about 2011, I did give it a look, but it was pretty bare-bones at that point, and certainly didn't have anything to offer that motivated me to move away from Emacs/ESS. So, when I started using R around 2001, it was natural to do my R scripting and programming in Emacs (using its ESS package, which I'd already been using with SAS since the early 90s). I've also got a lot of mileage out of it's features for calendaring, scheduling, note-taking, and agenda making. I believe most of what follows will apply to any GNU Emacs distribution or derivative on any platform, but of course, YMMV.īy way of background, I've been using Emacs since the late 80s as an IDE for various programming languages (e.g., pascal, C, lisp, matlab, python), and as a general text editor. I have used, and occassionally still use, Emacs on a variety of different unixen. I use GNU Emacs on MS Windows 11, specifically, the pre-packaged pre-compiled distributions for Windows provided by Vince Goulet ( ).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |