User manual

Chapter 2: Installing ESS on your system 19
2 Installing ESS on your system
The following section details those steps necessary to get ESS running on your system.
2.1 Step by step instructions
1. Download the latest zip or tgz archive from ESS downloads area and unpack it into
a directory where you would like ESS to reside. We will denote this directory as
‘/path/to/ESS/’ hereafter.
Alternatively you can use git to fetch the most recent development version to your
local machine with:
git clone https://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS.git /path/to/ESS
2. Optionally, compile elisp files and build the documentation with:
cd /path/to/ESS/
make
Without this step, info, pdf and html documentation and reference card will not be
available.
3. Optionally, install into your local machine with make install. You might need ad-
ministrative privileges:
make install
The files are installed into /usr/share/emacs directory. For this step to run correctly
on Mac OS X, you will need to adjust the ‘PREFIX’ path in ‘Makeconf’. The necessary
code and instructions are commented in that file.
4. If you have performed the make install step from above, just add
(require ’ess-site)
to your ‘~/.emacs’ file. Otherwise, you should add ‘/path/to/ESS/lisp/’ to your
emacs load path and then load ESS with the following lines in your ‘~/.emacs’:
(add-to-list ’load-path "/path/to/ESS/lisp/")
(load "ess-site")
5. Restart your Emacs and check that ESS was loaded from a correct location with M-x
ess-version.
Note for Windows and Mac OS X users: The most straightforward way to install Emacs
on your machine is by downloading all-in-one Emacs binary by Vincent Goulet.
Note for XEmacs users: 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.
2.2 License
The source and documentation of ESS is free software. You can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.