[ESS] new user questions: appending to transcripts and buffer management

[Charles C. Berry]

On Sat, 14 Aug 2010, Alex Bokov wrote:

> I've been working with R for a couple of years, but I have taken the plunge 
> into emacs and ESS only recently. I was surprised by how much I was able to 
> figure out about using ESS by searching on my own, but the following two 
> questions are still stumping me and I hope someone here can help.
>
> 1.    If I quit an R session without quitting the buffer then later start a 
> new one in that buffer, it will append to the existing buffer contents after 
> delimiting them with a form-feed. This would be an improvement over the 
> native loadhistory() and savehistory() method, except that it only works 
> until I have to quit emacs. I cannot just save the transcript file with C-x 
> C-w and restore the buffer state from it later.  The .St file gets opened in 
> ess-transcript mode instead of in R-mode and even though I can still send 
> previous commands to an R process in a separate buffer, there doesn't seem to 
> be any way to append to the original .St file. If I save the new R buffer to 
> an .St file, it overwrites the original.
>
> How can I either append to an .St file or in some other way restore the exact 
> state of an R buffer after rebooting my laptop?
>

I think that the general advice is to not bother to try this. Instead work 
from an ess-mode edit buffer (*.R) and send commands to the R process from 
there using the ess-eval-* commands. (If you do not know these, check the 
ESS menu or type 'C-h f ess-eval-<TAB> and a buffer listing them all will 
appear.

Save the buffer when you quit. When you restart later

 	M-x find-file whatever.R 
then
 	C-c C-l

will run ess-load-file and you can continue.

Every so often, I forget this advice and enter commands at the R prompt. 
If I want to save this work, I can save it as *.Rt, then clean the 
transcript, and copy it into or save it as *.R. :-) If you insist on 
working from the transcript buffer, you can then kill the cleaned buffer 
without saving and redo find-file, and you are ready to go.



> 2.    Emacs in general and ESS in particular spams me like crazy with various 
> temporary buffers. What I would like to do is have one frame with a small 
> collection of buffers I selected that I can cycle through using 
> previous-buffer and next-buffer. All other buffers would be completely banned 
> from that frame no matter how important emacs thinks they are and they would 
> be instead be forced to use a separate frame.
>
> It would also be nice to automatically kill certain sessions as soon as they 
> stop being in the foreground, but for now I'll settle just for segregating 
> them all in one frame.
>
> Any suggestions on how to do that?

I'd start by looking at

 	http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryBufferSwitching

I know there are some devotees of 'icicles' on this list, and 'doremi' and 
some other links might warrant a look.


HTH,

Chuck

>
>
>
> Thank you
>
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>

Charles C. Berry                            (858) 534-2098
                                             Dept of Family/Preventive Medicine
E mailto:cberry at tajo.ucsd.edu	            UC San Diego
http://famprevmed.ucsd.edu/faculty/cberry/  La Jolla, San Diego 92093-0901