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

[Tak Wing Chan]

Hello

Thanks ever so much for the replies and suggestions of many colleagues.

I haven't got very far testing out things yet. But here is a summary of 
my experience:

- I can start a shell within emacs by typing "M-x shell". Further 
typing "stata" returns the message of "stata: command not found". But 
typing "StataSE" will open Stata in Aqua, taking me out of emacs and 
blackbox which is my X11 window-manager. (Note that I have added the 
StataSE folder to my search path.)

- likewise at xterm, I can open Stata within Aqua by typing 
"/Applications/Stata/StataSE.app" But again this takes me back to Aqua.

- As Bill points out, the problem seems to be that "gui apps cannot 
start up and then live in a terminal window". Starting Stata as 
indicated above takes me away from Emacs. But I quite like to run Stata 
within emacs.

Thanks again for your support and suggestions. If I get any further, I 
will write back.

Best wishes.  Wing

ps I am running ESS-5.2.3


On 5 Nov 2004, at 4:06 pm, Bill Rising wrote:

> 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
Department of Sociology, University of Oxford
Manor Road, Oxford OX1 3UQ, UK
tel +44 (1865) 286176 fax +44 (1865) 286171
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfos0006