On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 12:02 PM, Antonio P. Ramos
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> So I also have a questions: why should we learn Emacs?
>
> Clearly, it takes much more time and effort to be learned than the
> other options (any good manual for a polish type user?) and it is not
> clear for me what are the advantages: What is so special about this
> editor for, say, a daily user of R and Latex? Many of us love it, but
> it is still not clear for me why...
I think the primary advantages of Emacs are:
- Fairly good integration with statistical software (R, S-PLUS, Stata,
whatever) via the ESS package. You can create a script file for your
analysis (replication, replication, replication) and execute
highlighted chunks of it in R via ESC x ess-eval-region-and-go -
useful if you are fiddling with parts of your analysis or trying to
get the graphs *just* right. Your R output is all in one buffer you
can save easily - and search at will.
- You can run everything from one window using keyboard shortcuts
instead of switching back and forth to a Terminal or R console.
- You can similarly run all your *TeX commands as a subprocess. The
truly pedantic can set up a Makefile to build complex LaTeX documents
(e.g. do the right sequence through bibtex etc. to get all references
resolved).
- Syntax highlighting, indentation, etc. of R code and LaTeX code.
- Ubiquitous. It runs on Windows, OS X, Linux, mainframes, whatever.
Learn one editor for every environment you might ever need to use. It
runs over X or in an SSH terminal session: I can edit files on a
computer 1000 miles away as easily as files on my desktop. Hide your
32-core machine running Unix that does your hierarchical Bayesian 1
million-iteration MCMC runs under the desk (or in the server room) and
login to do your analysis from your WinXP/Mac "word processing"
computer environment.
Other editors have caught up to some extent, so I'm not sure I'd
recommend it to folks starting out. But the learning curve of Emacs
has also come down due to improvements in its windowing support -
Aquamacs is very nice, for example, for OS X, and "mainline" GNU Emacs
is improving, albeit more slowly than we might like. (The
emacs-snapshot packages for Debian and Ubuntu Linux are very nice, but
those changes are months, if not years, away from showing up in a
Stallman-blessed release version.)
As far as books go... try the O'Reilly book:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596006488/index.html
Chris
--
Christopher N. Lawrence, Ph.D. <[log in to unmask]>
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Texas A&M International University
313 LBVSC, 5201 University Blvd
Laredo, Texas 78041-1920
Website: http://www.cnlawrence.com/
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