[ESS] Need help installing ess using M-x package-install-file

[Jeremie Juste]

Hello Naresh,

On Saturday, 10 Dec 2022 at 08:46, Naresh Gurbuxani via ESS-help wrote:
> In my organization, IT security set up disables emacs package
> installation from package archives (e.g. MELPA) using M-x
> package-install.  Therefore, I am downloading package tar files from
> package archives, then using M-x package-install-file command.  This
> method has successfully installed several packages (e.g., auctex) on
> my computer.  But with ess, I have run into problems.


I feel for you. Do you have a personal computer that you can control? I
see that you are working in a Windows environment. Many times I installed
all the packages one machine then just copied the .emacs.d directory
to the other machine, with  most packages working as expected.

If this is an option for you ESS might work out of the box as well. You
might just have to let ESS know where to find R.

|(setq inferior-ess-r-program "c:/Users/JeremieJuste/Documents/R/R-4.2.0/bin/x64/Rterm")
|(add-to-list 'exec-path "c:/Users/JeremieJuste/Documents/R/R-4.2.0/bin/")

Alternatively, for ESS you also have the git repo https://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS.
>From that you can switch to branch 18.10.

You have more information in the manual
https://ess.r-project.org/Manual/ess.html#Installation.



As far as I understand ESS is supposed to work even without compiling it
on your machine. Although it won't provide the best experience but is
expected to work.


| (add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/ESS/lisp")
| (require 'ess-site)
| (setq-default inferior-R-program-name
|                        "c:/Program Files/Microsoft/R Open/R-3.5.1/bin/x64/Rterm.exe")


I also note that you are running R 3.5. From the 4.2,
R uses UTF-8 as the native encoding. This has been a real pain before.

Please see https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/NEWS.html


HTH,
Jeremie