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Mac Text editors

14 messages · Steven Wolf, Albyn Jones, David Winsemius +7 more

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Hi everyone,

I've recently moved from using a windows machine to a Mac (some might call it an upgrade, others not?I'll let you be the judge).  Once I started using Notepad ++ on my windows machine, I really began to like it.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure what the free text editor options are for the Mac (Notepad ++ is windows only).  I've dabbled with Linux before and used Emacs/ESS there.  However, I seem to remember fighting pretty hard to make that work and the OSX file structure isn't that intuitive to me yet.  (For example, where is my .emacs file?)  

What text editors are best for the Mac, keeping in mind that I'm probably going to use them via the command line interface (e.g. X11 or Terminal).

Thanks!
-Steve

_______________________________
Steven Wolf
Research Associate
CREATE for STEM Institute
115 H Erickson Hall
Michigan State University
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Have you looked at aquamacs? (emacs for the mac).
its at aquamacs.org.

albyn
On 2012-09-26 17:48, Steven Wolf wrote:
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On Sep 26, 2012, at 5:48 PM, Steven Wolf wrote:

            
Probably best in the future to post to R-SIG-Mac.

The editor in the Mac-GUI works well. Has parenthesis, bracket and ellipsis matching which is very helpful. Also tab-completion thanks to the continuing effors to Simon Urbanek and Hans-Joerg Bibiko and probably others whose contributions are too subtle for for my aging brane. You can also get R-specific macro behaviors with TextWrangler. The default editor defined by options() is "vi" which has many powerful features as well. (I do not think I am interacting with 'vi' inside the editing panels that pop up from the GUI, although I would be happy to be corrected on this point.) Emacs is a UNIX standard and the Mac is yet-another-Unix-boxen.

Many Mac users are also happy with R-Studio.
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On Sep 26, 2012, at 5:48 PM, Steven Wolf wrote:

            
Further point. Just as with Windoze, your dot-files are hidden by Finder.app. You can see them with terminal or do as I do and unhide them (and never trash any).

Run this in a terminal session:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES


# and <pt>-click-hold> on Dock-Finder-icon, choose relaunch
David Winsemius, MD
Alameda, CA, USA
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On Sep 26, 2012, at 6:06 PM, David Winsemius wrote:

            
Sorry. I do not know how to relaunch in Snow Leopard. Those direction for relaunching Finder.app worked in Leopard but when I just checked, no longer seem to.
David Winsemius, MD
Alameda, CA, USA
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My vote for R-Studio. Very elegant design and great functionality. However if coming from languages like Java and others then eclipse is better. R-Studio have dedicated section for Mac user which you will find useful.



Best Regards,

Bhupendrasinh Thakre
Sent from my iPhone
On Sep 26, 2012, at 7:48 PM, Steven Wolf <wolfste4 at msu.edu> wrote:

            
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On 12-09-26 9:21 PM, Bhupendrasinh Thakre wrote:
One of the nice features of R-Studio is that it has a built in LaTeX 
support, including Sweave and knitr.  The PDF viewer synchronizes with 
the source, which is extremely convenient.  It is also cross-platform, 
so if you learn to use it and then switch OS's again, you don't need to 
go through this search again.

(But I have to admit that I don't use R-Studio all the time.  I've used 
a Windows editor (Textpad) for so long that it's hard to break the 
habit.  On a Mac I'll generally run it under Parallels, even when 
running R in MacOS.  This is another approach to cross-platform 
development, albeit a pretty silly one.)

Duncan Murdoch
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On 27-09-2012, at 02:48, Steven Wolf <wolfste4 at msu.edu> wrote:

            
You could also take TextMate into consideration.
There is version 1.5: stable and excellent. With very good support for R with an R bundle. 
Works nicely in Mountain Lion as long as you turn off smooth scrolling (via Terminal).
It also has a commandline tool to start the application.

There is now also an alpha version of TextMat 2. I don't use it yet.

Berend
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Thanks everyone for all of your help.  This has really helped me filter all of the noise about text editors on the internet.

-Steve
On Sep 27, 2012, at 5:41 AM, Berend Hasselman <bhh at xs4all.nl> wrote:

            
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On Sep 26, 2012, at 8:09 PM, David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net> wrote:

            
After the above command in a terminal window, you can use:

  killall -HUP Finder

to restart Finder gently. Note that if you do this, you will also see .DS_Store files on your desktop and in folders. It's an annoyance, but just be aware of it. They are system files that store folder attributes.

Also, if Steven is interested in using Emacs/ESS, an easy way to do it is to use Vincent Goulet's DMG package, available here:

  http://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca/en/emacs/mac/

The .emacs file will be /Users/YourUserName/.emacs

Unless you change Finder in the above manner as David notes, it will not show up, nor will other files or folders the begin with a '.', nor will system related folders (eg. /Users/YourUserName/Library).

An advantage of Emacs/ESS is of course that it is cross-platform. I have used it on Windows (many moons ago), Linux and now OSX. As Duncan noted in his reply, so is R-Studio, if you should decide to look at that option. If you should be using any kind of version control system (eg. Subversion or Git), both Emacs/ESS and R-Studio have built in support.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz
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On Sep 27, 2012, at 02:59 , Albyn Jones wrote:

            
Seconded, especially if you also want AUC-TeX features. For pure R purposes, as others have noted, the built-in editors in R.app and Rstudio are often good enough and less confusing to students during teaching. 

(I gather that .emacs functionality ends up in ~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs\ Emacs/* . You're not really expected to bypass the menus, though.)

-Peter D.
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On Sep 27, 2012, at 8:33 AM, Hasan Diwan <hasan.diwan at gmail.com> wrote:

            
That is but one location:

  http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PreferencesInAquamacs

One of the many annoyances I found when trying Aquamacs 3+ years ago when I first moved to OSX from Fedora Linux.

GNU Emacs for OSX from:

  http://emacsformacosx.com

which is what I use, is a better option for an Emacs that is a "regular" Emacs...or as I noted in my earlier reply, the Emacs/ESS bundle from Vincent Goulet. Vincent's included Emacs is from the above site.

Regards,

Marc
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Hello,
I am not a Mac user, but I use Eclipse+StatET in both Windows and
Linux, and it is the best IDE (not just text editor) for me. It
supports code syntax, R and Sweave editors, object explorer, document
outline, debugging, ... Besides, Eclipse has other plugins that may be
useful for some tasks in R (web programming, xml, LaTeX, ...)
http://www.walware.de/goto/statet
It is supposed to run also in Mac, but I have not tested it.

Good luck!
Emilio L. Cano

2012/9/27 Steven Wolf <wolfste4 at msu.edu>: