[ESS] Configuring Emacs "à la RStudio"

[Vitalie Spinu]

 >>> "Sebastien Vauban" on Tue, 19 Nov 2013 09:31:31 +0100 wrote:

[...]


 S> I meant that, upon opening a .R file, extra windows get automatically created,
 S> and laid out as in R studio: script file, "R shell", data in memory, graphics.

You will have no luck with that. That is the "feature" of emacs which
makes it stay apart. The fundamental principle is "you get something
whenever you need it" as opposite to "always have it, whether it is
needed or not". This is precisely why emacs doesn't stay in your way,
but other editors do. There are hundreds of useful tools in emacs, you
cannot have them all displayed at once. 

It is also why emacs is difficult to learn, as you need to learn how to
activate the things when you need them; but then you need to know that
those things exist in the first place :-)

 S> Side question: when opening a .R file, I get ESS[S] written in the modeline.
 S> What must I do to get ESS[R]?  What's the impact of having S displayed?

This one is historically motivated. The letter stands for the language which
is S. R is a dialect of S. People proposed to change that some time ago,
but we decided to keep it for reasons that I cannot now remember.

   Vitalie