[ESS] Emacs/ESS is missing that feature

[Vitalie Spinu]

 >> Andreas Leha <andreas.leha at med.uni-goettingen.de>
 >> on Fri, 12 Jul 2013 21:45:19 +0200 wrote:

 > Rodney Sparapani <rsparapa at mcw.edu> writes:
 >>> 2. decent support to display large tables/data.frames (or .csv files)
 >> 
 >> Did you try C-c C-d C-e?
 >> 
 >> C-c C-d C-e runs the command ess-describe-object-at-point, which is an
 >> interactive compiled Lisp function in `ess-help.el'.
 >> 
 >> It is bound to C-c C-d e, C-c C-d C-e.
 >> 
 >> (ess-describe-object-at-point)

 > [...]

 > Yes, I am aware of that function and I do indeed use that extensively.

 > For me, these summaries, head, etc suffice and are more than handy.

 > But still, while discussing my analyses with the client, the client is
 > usually not familiar with the different summaries and likes to see the
 > data.  In these situations, I (far too) often write data to a csv which
 > I than open in a spreadsheet program.

 > I would love to see a better possibility to present a larger data set
 > from within emacs.  Ideally without leaving ess, or via the csv route.

This is a dream project for me. Proper data handling and manipulation
with slicing/reshaping/viewporting + plot and generation of summaries. I
never started it as it would require a considerably more advanced
sub-process communication protocol than what we have now in
ESS. Something along swank or, better, nrepl. This is a priority
project. 

Another project, for which I already have a name, ess-analyze, is an
menu/keyboard/helm/yas driven statistical analysis toolboxes,
incorporating, for begging, the functionality available in R-commander
and Deducer, but without annoying menus and click-button interfaces.

As to image in emacs, it should be indeed easy, now that emacs builds
with image-magic it is really worth a serious try.

    Vitalie