[ESS] Assignment operator "<-" not bound to "_" anymore (or any other default it seems).

[Marius Hofert]

Hi,

In 18.10.3snapshot (GNU Emacs 26.1, macOS 10.14.4) "_" is not the
assignment operator "<-" anymore (it still was in 18.10.2). This step,
especially the fact that there is no new default to obtain "<-" (or is
there?) might scare away users... I'm also posting this so that others
can find it as it took me quite some time to figure out that this was
somewhat announced: search for "<-" on
http://ess.r-project.org/Manual/readme.html -- referring to version
19.04 (unreleased; why so many versions ahead?).

Is there a new recommended way to get "<-"? I now use...

(define-key ess-r-mode-map (kbd "M--") #'ess-insert-assign)
(define-key inferior-ess-r-mode-map (kbd "M--") #'ess-insert-assign)

... to bind M-- to "<-",  as RStudio uses. This makes it easier to
switch to RStudio when teaching from that. Don't get me wrong, I'm a
die-hard Emacs + ESS user since about 2010 when Martin Maechler
introduced ESS to me, but in our undergrad courses with class sizes of
up to 1000 students, we are kind of required to teach from RStudio as
this is what students nowadays use.

Not having a default for "<-" seems weird to me and not everyone likes
to make adjustments to .emacs just to get basic functionality (... and
thus probably switches to RStudio...).

Cheers,
Marius





-- 
Marius Hofert, Dr. rer. nat.
Assistant Professor
Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science
Faculty of Mathematics
University of Waterloo
200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1
+1-519-888-4567, ext. 31394 (office M3 4207)
http://math.uwaterloo.ca/~mhofert