ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics)

As I have mentioned, S-Plus under Unix is very difficult to use. People who are familiar with emacs soon come out a way to relieve the pain using `emacs shell mode'. That is to say, you can,

start emacs: emacs
start a shell: M-x shell
start S-Plus in this shell: Splus

After you start S-Plus within emacs, you can edit your S-Plus script in other windows and copy-paste command into S-Plus command line. You can now even edit the command line with emacs command.

However, people who are really familiar with emacs, know its omnipotence did not stop here. They started writing emacs extensions specifically for S-Plus, R, SAS etc. The result is ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics.) which provides

• Command line editing. In addition to what Splus/windows provides, you can edit previous commands, search the command history ...
• Completion. You can use tab to complete a command.
• Transcript recording. You can record all the actions in an S-Plus session.
• Syntax awareness editing of splus script and facilities to evaluating S code. (More than what F10 can do under windows.)

To check if ESS has been properly set up, simply start emacs and fire command M-x S. If S-Plus does not start, check your .emacs file and visit helpdesk dot file repository. For more information about ESS, visit helpdesk FAQ page http://www.stat.rice.edu/ helpdesk. Note that you can also start R from within emacs by command M-x R.