[ESS] 2 things I wish ESS would do

[Richard M. Heiberger]

Paul,

2. Can you make it easier to transfer commands that work from the *R*
window back to the script file "blob.R" ?  Once we do hack our way to
success in the *R* file, we want to get those commands back and save
them.  At the current time, the only way I can find is to highlight
the whole section of the *R* buffer, copy it over to "blob.R" and then
delete all the lines that don't start with > and edit the rest.


This is available.  Use M-x ess-transcript-clean-region and
ess-transcript-clean-buffer
to remove all lines from the transcript buffer that are not input lines.
These functions are designed for the ESS transcript buffer.  They work, but
not well, in
the *R* buffer.   Therefore your steps would be to highlight and copy an
output region to a blob.rt buffer, use C-x C-q to make it writable, then use
ess-transcript-clean-buffer to isolate the input lines.  Edit out the
redundancies
and false starts.  Save the resulting lines in your original blob.R or in
another myfile.R.


On the option to save C-c C-n lines as part of R history, I want that too.
My motivation includes yours.  In addition, I want the option to make
the *R* buffer to behave the same as the S-Plus GUI on Windows.
The GUI is a parallel process to emacs, not
an inferior process of emacs as the *R* buffer is.  Therefore the GUI does
not
distinguish between lines that are sent over with C-c C-n and lines that are
manually typed.  I looked at the code a few years ago and decided the
relevant
code was buried deeper than I wanted to find at that time.  If you can find
the
location that needs adjusting, I will be happy to install the adjustment.

Rich