[ESS] Macintosh followup advice and question

[Paul Johnson]

I've urged the students to try Emacs on Mac and Dr Goulet's installer works
very well.


In the process, I've learned a couple of things. I wonder if these messages
should be conveyed to users more bluntly

1. It is VITAL to go into the Mac's Mission Control and change the shortcut
keys.  THey are currently using Control-up arrow and Control-down arrow as
window manager things, and if you don't free up those shortcuts, your like
in the R console is empty, without any joy whatsoever.

This seems like such a vital piece of advice that it should be plainly
stated somewhere on the "R for mac users".  Advice sheets I find generally
assume a user likes Macs and Emacs and neither is true for most of these
users, they just want to know what to do.

2. Also we need to say "XQuartz" is a mandatory install, there's no point
having R without it.


Now, my question.

3. In Emacs Mac, How do you save the output from *R* as a text file?  I
told the users to just save the *R* window with File->save as and give the
file the same name as the R file and a suffix "Rout".  User came in showing
that when he saves the transcript, Emacs only saves a backup file, it never
gets promoted to a real file. I mean, it is always marked #.  WHen emacs
closes down, it says do you want to save the files, but in the end the
result is always #backup.Rout#

I realize now the workflow I use is proabably wrong.  I should have told
him to close the R session, then try to save the *R* windows with a file
name whatever.Rout. Is that what you would do?

-- 
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

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]