User manual

Chapter 1: Introduction to ESS 10
• ESS[Julia]: Help system works again.
Changes/New Features in 12.09:
• Due to XEmacs lacking some features that ESS requires, ESS support of XEmacs ends
with ESS 12.04-4. This decision will be re-visited in the future as XEmacs continues
to sync with GNU Emacs.
• ESS[R]: On Windows, there is now a new customizable variable (currently called ess-
directory-containing-R) to tell ESS where to look for the ‘Rterm.exe’ executables.
The name of the variable and the values it can take are both in beta and subject to
change. Prior to this variable, ESS searched only in the default installation directory.
Setting this variable now tells ESS how to find ‘Rterm.exe’ executables when they are
installed somewhere else.
• ESS[julia]: new mode for editing julia code (‘*.jl’). Start with M-x julia.
Full interaction interface, imenu and basic error referencing are available.
• ESS[R] noweb: noweb-mode and noweb-font-lock-mode have been renamed to ess-
noweb-mode and ess-noweb-font-lock-mode to avoid conflicts with the “real” noweb-
mode.
• ESS[R] noweb: The long standing font-lock bug has been solved in ess-noweb interface.
• ESS: Basic evaluation keys are now bound to ess-eval-region-*- functions:
− C-M-x is bound to ess-eval-region-or-function-or-paragraph
− C-c C-c is bound to ess-eval-region-or-function-or-paragraph-and-step
− C-RET is bound to ess-eval-region-or-line-and-step
Each of these functions first evaluates the region whenever the region is active.
• ESS: C-M-a/C-M-e now step to beginning/end of paragraph if no function has been
detected.
• ESS: ess-eval-*-and-step family of functions are now smarter, and don’t step to end
of buffer or end of chunk code (@) when at the end of the code.
• ESS: ess-handy-commands function is bound to C-c h
• ESS: ESS is now blinking the evaluated region. Set ess-blink-region to nil to deacti-
vate; ess-blink-delay gives the duration of the blink. Evaluated region is “blinked”
in highlight face.
• ESS[R-help] New key a for “apropos()” in help buffers. Also available through C-c h.
• ESS[R-help] All R commands of type foo?bar and foo??bar are recognized and redirected
into appropriate *ESS-help* buffers.
• ESS[R]: New customization interface for font-lock.
ESS font-lock operates with predefined keywords. Default keywords are listed in ess-
R-font-lock-keywords and inferior-R-font-lock-keywords, which see. The user
can easily customize those by adding new keywords. These variables can also be inter-
actively accessed and saved through ESS/Font-lock submenu.
Several new fontification keywords have been added. Most notably the keywords for
highlighting of function calls, numbers and operators.
• ESS[R]: auto-complete is now activated by default whenever auto-complete package is
detected. Set ess-use-auto-complete to nil to deactivate.