All I had to do was wait for the install to complete, start Emacs, and then issue the command to start ESS: ESC x R. (Note: there's a typo where I describe this command in my slides.) Emacs was installed automatically, as a dependency. I was pleasantly shocked: it took me less than 5 minutes. So I set aside a good hour to get ESS and Emacs working on Ubuntu. But (remembering from the times when I was developing it) I expected ESS to be a bit trickier to install. Installing REvolution R on Ubuntu was a piece of cake. But for my talk to the Linux User Group in Davis the other day, it seemed appropriate to use it for my R demonstration. I have a confession to make: I haven't used ESS in several years. (Disclaimer: I wrote much of the ESS code several years ago for S-PLUS it's since been extended to work with R and several other stats packages.) Emacs itself has a fairly steep learning curve, but if you know Emacs (or are willing to learn it), you can increase your R productivity significantly by using ESS. That's where ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics) comes in: it's an extension to the popular GNU Emacs editor/lifestyle-choice that makes it easier to work with R source code and interact with the R interpreter. But as you get more adept at R, a good practice is to work from script files rather than directly at the command-line, and cutting-and-pasting from text files into R is a pain. If you're using R on a Linux or Unix system, there's not much available in terms of a graphical user interface in the standard R distribution: you're pretty much stuck with the command line.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |