[ESS] Advice on setting up ESS to edit and knit Rmarkdown files

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Chris,

I don't have great advice.

I have been doing this in Emacs with ESS (and friends like polymode) 'for
years' and it mostly worked. So thumbs up -- it worth doing and I prefer
doing it in Emacs. Polymode is actually rather cool.

The world being what it is these days, the predictable six-month cycle of ESS
updates stopped at some point with "much bigger, much better" next release
"right around the corner".  And then that never happened (yet).  So sometimes
I tried updating via the Emacs package manager, but once or twice something
odd happened so I reverted to the content of the deb package I look after --
it is still at 18.10 (even though it is now, just like other Debian ELPA
packages, mostly a shim around the (versioned) ELPA package).

Long story short, 'apt install elpa-ess' should work. As emails I have 25-ish
years of cruft in .emacs but not too too much relative to ESS and
RMarkdown. It generally just works and it is fun to use. I really do live in
it for just about everything I write these days.

Dirk

-- 
https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org