I am the author and current maintainer of three packages for the R statistical programming language. I also have a library of code snippets for R, emacs, and LaTeX that I will post from time to time, as I clean them up for public review.
I write everything in Emacs: code, reviews, manuscripts, lecture slides, and even recommendation letters. Specifically, I use Aquamacs Emacs, an emacs port for MacOS. GNU Emacs has been around since 1985, so it is just plain solid, with a huge user base for support, and thousands of packages and modes that can do anything from syntax highlighting of your favorite programming language (ess-r-mode
) to psychotherapy (doctor
). By using the same program for ever a fully-featured platform, I can use the same program (and thus, the same keybindings) for everything I do.
Emacs is easy to use. Configuring Emacs can be hard. Someday I will post my configuration file, which has evolved quite a bit over the last decade.
For statistical computing, I code in the R language, using Emacs with the ESS package (E macs S peaks S tatistics). ESS let’s me have both my R source document and an active R session open at the same time, in the same Emacs session. It saves a lot of time to be able to send a chunk of source code directly into R with two keystrokes.
web-mode
) and text content (markdown-mode
) in Emacs.