Why Use Emacs 1 - Emacs Speaks Statistics

Scientists has reputation of being bad programmers, who wrote code that is unreadable and therefore incomprehensible to others. I have intention to become top level programmer and followed a style guide strictly. It means I have to spent sometime in adding and removing space in the code.

To my surprise, Emacs will do it for me automatically, just by hitting the TAB and it also indents smartly, which make me conformable to write long function call and split it into multiple lines. Here's an example. Also, if I miss placed a ')' or ']' the formatting will become strange and it reminders me to check.

rainfall.subset london,
rainfall.pairs,
rainfall.dublin)

I frequently search the command history. Imaging I was produce a plot and I realised there was something miss in the data, so I go back and fix the data first, then run the ggplot command again, I press Up/Down bottom many times, or just search once/two times. M-x ggplot( will give me the most recent command I typed containing the keyword ggplot(, then I press RET to select the command, which might be ggplot(gg.df, aes(lon, lat, col = city)) + geom_line() + ...... If it is not I want, I press C-r again to choose the second most recent one and repeat until I find right one.

I am a supporter of literate statistical analysis and believe we should put code, results and discoveries together in developing models. Rstudio provides an easy to use tool for this purpose, but it does not support different R sessions, so if I need to generate a report, I have to re-run all the code from beginning, which isn't particle for me with volumes data because it will take quit long.

ESS and org-mode works really well via Babel, which is more friendly to use. I can choose to run only part of the code and have the output being inserted automatically, no need to copy/paste. Also, I can choose where to execute the code, on my local machine or the remote server, or both at the same time.

These are only the surface of ESS and there are lot more useful features like spell checking for comments and documentation templates, that makes me productive and I would recommend anyone uses R to learn ESS/Emacs. The following is my current setting.

;; Adapted with one minor change from Felipe Salazar at
;; http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsSpeaksStatistics
(require 'ess-site)
(setq ess-ask-for-ess-directory nil) ;; start R on default folder
(setq ess-local-process-name "R")
(setq ansi-color-for-comint-mode 'filter) ;;
(setq comint-scroll-to-bottom-on-input t)
(setq comint-scroll-to-bottom-on-output t)
(setq comint-move-point-for-output t)
(setq ess-eval-visibly-p 'nowait) ;; no waiting while ess evalating
(defun my-ess-start-R ()
(interactive)
(if (not (member "*R*" (mapcar (function buffer-name) (buffer-list))))
(progn
(delete-other-windows)
(setq w1 (selected-window))
(setq w1name (buffer-name))
(setq w2 (split-window w1 nil t))
(R)
(set-window-buffer w2 "*R*")
(set-window-buffer w1 w1name))))
(defun my-ess-eval ()
(interactive)
(my-ess-start-R)
(if (and transient-mark-mode mark-active)
(call-interactively 'ess-eval-region)
(call-interactively 'ess-eval-line-and-step)))
(add-hook 'ess-mode-hook
'(lambda()
(local-set-key [(shift return)] 'my-ess-eval)))
(add-hook 'inferior-ess-mode-hook
'(lambda()
(local-set-key [C-up] 'comint-previous-input)
(local-set-key [C-down] 'comint-next-input)))
(add-hook 'ess-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(flyspell-prog-mode)
(run-hooks 'prog-mode-hook)
;; (prog-mode)
))

;; REF: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2901198/useful-keyboard-shortcuts-and-tips-for-ess-r
;; Control and up/down arrow keys to search history with matching what you've already typed:
(define-key comint-mode-map [C-up] 'comint-previous-matching-input-from-input)
(define-key comint-mode-map [C-down] 'comint-next-matching-input-from-input)