[ESS] running Stata SE 8.2 using ESS on Mac OSX

[Bill Rising]

On Nov 5, 2004, at 5:43, Tak Wing Chan wrote:

> Hello
>
> I just changed platform from Linux to Mac OSX and upgraded from Stata 
> 7 to Stata 8 as well.
>
> I have been running Stata 7 from within Emacs using ESS, and would 
> like to do the same with Stata 8. I have X11 (running full screen 
> mode), Emacs, ESS, etc set up on my Mac, and "M-x R" would run R 
> nicely on my Mac. But I cannot do the equivalent for Stata.
>
> Since Stata 8 now lives in the /Applications Folder of Mac, I have 
> built a symbolic link from /usr/bin to Stata as follows:
>
> ln -s /Applications/Stata/StataSE.app/Contents/MacOS/StataSE stata
>
> This doesn't work. I then try adding 
> /Applications/Stata/StataSE.app/Contents/MacOS/StataSE to my search 
> path. And when I type "M-x stata", I get "Process Stata is not 
> running".
>
> Has anyone got any experience with this problem? I would be most 
> grateful for any suggestion?

I tried playing around with the settings Chinh Nguyen gave when he 
answered your question on the Stata listserv, and as far as I can tell, 
the problem is that gui apps cannot start up and then live in a 
terminal window. I'm also guessing that this is really what ESS is 
expecting to happen, as it starts up an inferior process whose output 
is directed back to the emacs window. [ESS gurus can correct this if 
its wrong.]

So... the short story is that you can't run Stata from within emacs 
when running on Mac OS X, even when using X11, mainly because the Stata 
exectuable on Mac OS X is not an X11 app. Of course, I'm only 95% sure 
of this, because I haven't fiddled around with it for quite a while.

The applescript support is very weak for both emacs (where it is 
understandable) and Stata (where it is far less understandable to me). 
I'm going to try to hack together something which will allow sending a 
region to Stata for execution, but don't hold your breath. It won't 
quite be the same, but it would help while debugging code.

Bill
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