[ESS] How to Duplicate Previous Functionality/Workflow

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 22 September 2023 at 07:04, Stephen J. Eglen via ESS-help wrote:
| 2. A non-answer to the original question, but I prefer writing Makefiles
| to build my documents, rather than using Emacs functionality.  Emacs has
| a good interface to running make (e.g. through M-x compile).  Use
| whatever is best for you, but just thought I'd mention it.

Even simpler: I just rely on M-x compile-command (and its shortcut).

On the first invocation I edit the out the existing stanza 'make -k' that
would get invoked, and make it 'render.r filename.Rmd' to process the file I
currently edit.  Evince refreshed automagically. This is arguably a little
pedestrian, but it takes me away from a land with a language I do not speak
(elisp) to one I am rather comfortable in (scripts, shell scripts, littler
aka 'r' scripts, Rscript, ...) that do the task.

polymode has sometimes been finicky to install / updated, esp a few years
ago, and is also (if I read the tea leaves correctly) one of the reasons we
have not had an ESS release in five (5) years (which really is rather sad, at
least to this long time user) but it has been working fine the last couple of
years. I now settled on a mix of elpa-* packages I get from Ubuntu and a
number of 'directly from elpa/melpa' packages.  By and large it is still a
great editing experience.  I would guestimate that for the last decade I
wrote most output appearing as html (ie course website) and more frequently
pdf (slides for talks or lectures, short papers) in it.

Dirk

-- 
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