[ESS] ESS "highlighting" turned off .. {Re: [R] Tidying up code ...}

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "PD" == Peter Dalgaard <P.Dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk>
>>>>>     on Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:32:16 +0200 writes:

    PD> Martin Maechler wrote:
    >>>>>>> "PD" == Peter Dalgaard <P.Dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk>
    >>>>>>> on Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:52:15 +0200 writes:
    >>>>>>> 
    >> 
    PD> Martin Maechler wrote:
    >> >> I strongly agree with your last paragraph,
    >> >> and I have always thought that we should recommend using
    >> >> R-aware editors rather than  dump() nowadays ...
    >> >> but then I thought that I've been biased at all times, being a
    >> >> co-developer of ESS, authoring its M-x ess-fix-miscellaneous
    >> >> (and more), and also the author of a (non public) Emacs lisp
    >> >> file called 'R-stylepolice.el' as early as in 1999.....
    >> 
    >> 
    PD> BTW: Has there been any progress on turning the highlighting _off_ in
    PD> iESS and transcript mode? The highlighted "for" and "in" make me crazy...
    >> 
    >> we are really getting off-topic...
    >> and so I am -- as an exception -- cross-posting to ESS-help 
    >> but
    >> - I don't remember any feature-request of that kind,
    >> but that may well just expose my fading long-time memory
    >> 
    PD> [R-help snipped]

    PD> I think you said "Oh yes, that is really embarrassing" last time I
    PD> mentioned it....

aah... so indeed there's been problem of fading memory..

    >> - you can always use   M-x font-lock-mode
    >> which toggles font-locking ("highlighting").
    >> 

    PD> I should probably hook that in...

yeah maybe..

    >> - What I would want is font-locking in  iess- and transcript-mode,
    >> just not to highlight 'for' and 'in' (and a few more), but
    >> I'd like to keep the string and other font-locking.
    >> IIRC, that is simple in principle, but needs a bit of
    >> tedious work in practice.     

as I found that's not really been true.
The next version (5.3.9) of ESS will no longer fontify any such
keywords in S- and R-mode,
but continue to fontify other things.
All functional changes are localized to lisp/ess-cust.el
so you could replace your by the one from the ESS-devel svn
repository, https://svn.r-project.org/ESS/trunk/lisp/ess-cust.el
(and do not forget to also remove ess-cust.elc if you have one
 in your installed lisp/ !).


    PD> I'd avoid that and just font-lock the command line . There's really no
    PD> consistent way of telling how to fontify the output of an arbitrary line
    PD> of R . (Or not fontify it at all, but switching the colour of the
    PD> command line would be nice --- boldface is a bit useless if you've
    PD> already switched the font to courier 18 bold)

I agree that an arbitrary line of R output cannot be fontified
consistently. OTOH, I'd guess that 98% of my R output is very
nicely fontified, and I'd not want to miss that, particularly
not when I'm demo-ing R (using ESS).

Ideally, we'd have more customization here, and users could
customize what parts should be fontified and what not.
I agree e.g., that you (and sometimes I as well) might not want
to fontify strings in *R* / and *.Rout.

I don't have time to go there for the moment, but patches (from
people who know about emacs 'custom' things) are very welcome,
and for now I am happy that I've solved the one part I had agreed
to be embarassing.

Martin