[ESS] Care to critique some Emacs-ess slides?

[Paul Johnson]

Thanks for checking

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 9:40 AM, Rodney Sparapani <rsparapa at mcw.edu> wrote:
> On 08/22/2012 06:22 PM, Paul Johnson wrote:
>>
>> I told the students they have to use Emacs, and decided to write up
>> slides for that.
>>
>> http://pj.freefaculty.org/guides/Rcourse/emacs-ess/emacs-ess.pdf
>>
>> Title "Emacs Has No Learning Curve."
>>
>> I argue against the general option, which seems to be that Emacs is
>> too difficult and we all need to use RStudio or other IDEs that are
>> designed to run on cell phones.
>>[snip]
>> pj
>>
>
> Hi Paul:
>
> Very nice!  I agree with quite a lot of what you are saying.  What a
> lot of people don't seem to get is that RStudio is
> just for R.  The great power of emacs is/are modes.  We need to do all
> kinds of things besides R for which there are wonderful modes like
> C/C++, LaTeX, etc.  This is not meant to be a knock on RStudio as I
> really like what they are doing.  I have even more complaints
> about Eclipse and Xcode; they do allow plugins for other
> languages; but, they are really clumsy to use:  for those who have
> a hard time installing ESS try to get one of these other IDEs to
> work with a plugin!
>
> I want to put this link on the ESS web page.  Is that OK?
>
Yes, I am honored.

I thought of one other keystroke worth memorizing:

M-;  for commenting/uncommenting regions.

What else can we think of as worth memorizing?

I will be making corrections to the points you mention below and will
upload to same place.  In case you didn't notice, in the same folder I
leave the LyX file and graphics needed to reproduce this, so anybody
is free to take & modify to suit their purposes. I didn't put a
license declaration there, I'll put GPL v2 or later (when I remember).


> Just a couple of minor comments on the slides...
> Slide 13: Alt = Meta is not a given.
> Slide 16: actually, I think there were function keys around at the
> time that emacs was invented since it started on Dec hardware which
> are famous for their function keys.
> Slide 21: the web page got put together with the last word in the 1st line
>
> Slide 28:  This is a big digression...
> I have been fond of IBM's Common User Access (CUA) for Cut/Copy/Paste
> which don't conflict with Emacs at all.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_User_Access#Description
> Copy region: C-Insert
> Cut region:  Sh-Delete
> Paste region: Sh-Insert
> Unfortunately, I don't have a simple prescription for setting these,
> and my reading of the cua-mode documentation doesn't mention them.
> It seems to me that cua-mode is not really CUA at all.  Rather, it
> appears to be mimicking Apple's Human Interface Guidelines
> https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AppleHIGuidelines/KeyboardShortcuts/KeyboardShortcuts.html
>
> Slide 45: if you hover over the beginning of the modeline, then you
> will see that you can toggle read-only by clicking the 4th character
>
>
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-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science    Assoc. Director
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504     Center for Research Methods
University of Kansas               University of Kansas
http://pj.freefaculty.org            http://quant.ku.edu