Dear All, Thanks again to those who helped me to improve what is below. About the advantages of using ESS, I do not repeat here the opinions that have been sent recently on r-help (see particularly the messages by Prof Brian Ripley, Rich Heiberger, Peter Dalgaard, Faheem Mitha, Renaud Lancelot, Guido Masarotto; they should be in the list archive under the subject: Re: [R] Emacs & ESS under Windows). See also the R-FAQ. If I have still missed something, do not hesitate to tell me. Emmanuel Paradis ---------------------------------------- Short guide to install ESS under Windows ---------------------------------------- The following summary is for a Windows system (mainly NT, but this applies to 95/98 too) which has none of Emacs, gnuserv, or ESS installed. Sections 1 and 2 are about getting and installing Emacs, sections 3-6 are about getting and installing ESS, section 7 is about getting and installing gnuserv, and section 8 gives a few hints on how to start with ESS. It is assumed that all packages are or will be installed in D:\ (if you choose another location, change accordingly). It is preferable to install these packages (including R) in locations independent of each others, so that they can be updated easily. 1. Download a precompiled copy of Emacs v. 20.7 for Windows on Intel machines: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/windows/emacs/20.7/emacs-20.7-fullbin-i386.tar.gz This is a 13 Mb file that includes precompiled binaries of Emacs, and lisp source (useful for understanding how packages work, and how they can best be setup or customized). 2. Unpack the downloaded file in a directory, e.g., "D:\", then execute the file "D:\emacs-20.7\addpm.exe". Emacs is then installed on your Windows machine, and a shortcut should have been added to your Start menu. Installing Emacs may not be so straightforward depending on the setup of your system. For instance, it may be better to turn off virus checkers (Norton Anti-Virus 2001 breaks this, for example; McAfee virus scanner seems to interact badly with Emacs too). There is a very detailed FAQ for Emacs on Windows at: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs.html Section 3 of this FAQ details the installation process of Emacs under Windows. There are also lots of useful informations on how to customize Emacs. It is also recommended to change the default starting directory for Emacs to you own personal directory to help protect you from accidentally changing files in the Emacs directory. Do so by right-clicking on the Emacs short-cut, go to the "Shortcut" tab, and then change the value in "Start in:". 3. Download ESS v. 5.1.18 at: http://ess.stat.wisc.edu/pub/ESS/ESS-5.1.18.tar.gz It is a 558 Kb file. 4. Unpack the downloaded file in its own directory, e.g. "D:\" (of course, keeping the tree structure of the zip archive). Avoid unpacking this archive in the Emacs (sub)-directory(ies) so that you can upgrade Emacs and ESS independently in the future. 5. Edit the file "D:\ess-5.1.18\lisp\ess-site.el". In this file, the semicolons indicate comments. Find the line #250 (easy with Emacs...) which is like this: ;;(setq-default inferior-R-program-name "Rterm") ; msdos systems This line tells ESS where to find the R executable. Thus, uncomment the line, and write in place of "Rterm" where is your Rterm.exe, for instance, is you installed R v. 1.2.2 for Windows in D:\, the line becomes: (setq-default inferior-R-program-name "D:/rw1022/bin/Rterm") ; msdos systems Of course, you may delete the string "; msdos systems". If you installed R in C:\Program Files, then the line must be: (setq-default inferior-R-program-name "C:/Progra~1/rw1022/bin/Rterm") taking care to use the DOS name of the directory. Note that you may use "Rgui" instead of "Rterm", but R's outputs will be displayed in the Rgui console rather than within Emacs (as is the case with Rterm). 6. Edit or create a file called ".emacs" (or "_emacs"). You can read some infos on "What is a .emacs file?" at: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/faq3.html#what-startup When Emacs is started, it looks for the .emacs file in your HOME directory. HOME is an environment variable which can be set in several ways. Under Windows NT, open the Control Panel, go to the System panel, and click the "Environment" tab, then add (or modify) the appropriate environment variable. (This procedure gives the possibility to set HOME on a per-user basis.) Under Windows 95, you can set the HOME environment variable in your autoexec.bat file (you will need to reboot). If no HOME has been set, Emacs will look for .emacs in C:\. Once HOME has been set, add in .emacs the following line: (load-file "d:/ess-5.1.18/lisp/ess-site.el") 7. ESS is now configured to run with R and Emacs, but it is very useful to install gnuserv, a small program that allows file associations with Emacs (thus loading files into an already running Emacs, or if none, one is launched). More information are at: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/faq3.html#assoc where there is also a link to download gnuserv, or: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs/contrib/gnuserv-2.1p1.zip Unpack the dowloaded file, e.g. in D:\, and add in .emacs the following three lines: (load-file "d:/gnuserv/gnuserv.el") (require 'gnuserv) (gnuserv-start) You also need to have the gnuserv executables and runemacs.exe in your path (under Windows NT, this is done by editing the PATH environment variable in the System panel of the Control Panel), in our example, one needs to add "D:\emacs-20.7\bin;D:\gnuserv;" to this environment variable. Now, open Explorer, select "options" in the menu "view", select the "file types" tab, click on "New type...", fill the fields (specifying, of course, the .R extension), and under "actions", click "New...", a new window is then open. Under "action" type "open", and in the second field type D:\gnuserv\gnuclientw.exe "%1" where the "%1" allows filenames with blanks in them to bee treated as one argument when sent to Emacs. Close all windows by clicking "Ok". 8. When you open a *.R file, this opens Emacs and ESS. To run R under Emacs, type Alt-x R (M-x R in Emacs' terminology), and then Enter (this will open a DOS-like window, so you have to come back to Emacs). Within Emacs, you switch between the different files, buffers, processes, ... with the menu "Buffers". When you edit a *.R file you can evaluate the R expressions with the "ESS" menu by selecting "eval buffer" (or by typing Ctrl-c Alt-b, ... I mean C-c M-b). EP 6-3-2001 -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._
Emacs & ESS under Windows
1 message · Emmanuel Paradis