User manual

Chapter 11: Other ESS features and tools 57
search ess-execute-search
set-width ess-execute-screen-options
install.packages
ess-install.packages
library ess-library
setRepos ess-setRepositories
sos ess-sos
Handy commands: ess-library, ess-install.packages, etc - ask for item with com-
pletion and execute the correspond command. ess-sos is a interface to findFn function in
package sos. If package sos is not found, ask user for interactive install.
11.3 Syntactic highlighting of buffers
ESS provides Font-Lock (see Section “Using Multiple Typefaces” in The Gnu Emacs Ref-
erence Manual) patterns for Inferior S Mode, S Mode, and S Transcript Mode buffers.
Syntax highlighting within ESS buffers is controlled by:
[User Option]ess-font-lock-mode
Non-‘nil’ means we use font lock support for ESS buffers. Default is ‘t’, to use font
lock support. If you change the value of this variable, restart Emacs for it to take
effect.
The font-lock patterns are defined by the following variables, which you may modify if
desired:
[User Option]inferior-R-font-lock-keywords
Font-lock patterns for inferior *R* processes. (There is a corresponding inferior-
S-font-lock-keywords for *S* processes.) The default value highlights prompts,
inputs, assignments, output messages, vector and matrix labels, and literals such as
‘NA’ and TRUE.
[User Option]ess-R-font-lock-keywords
Font-lock patterns for ESS R programming mode. (There is a corresponding ess-
S-font-lock-keywords for S buffers.) The default value highlights function names,
literals, assignments, source functions and reserved words.
11.4 Parenthesis matching
Emacs and XEmacs have facilities for highlighting the parenthesis matching the parenthesis
at point. This feature is very useful when trying to examine which parentheses match each
other. This highlighting also indicates when parentheses are not matching. Depending on
what version of emacs you use, one of the following should work in your initialisation file:
(paren-set-mode ’paren) ;for XEmacs
(show-paren-mode t) ;for Emacs