A small customization of ESS
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JD Long (at Cerebral Mastication) posted a question on Twitter about an artifact in ESS, where typing “_” gets you “<-”. This is because in the early days of S+, “_” was an allowed assignment operator, and ESS was developed in that era. Later, it was disallowed in favor of “<-” and “=”, so ESS was modified to map “_” to “<-”. Now I like the typing convenience of this map, and I don’t use underscores in my variable names, so I was fine. JD probably was using underscores in his variable names, so this was rather frustrating. There are, I discovered, three ways around this:
- Type “_” twice, which puts in the underscore
- Use “C-q _”, i.e. Ctrl-q then underscore
- Put
(setq ess-S-assign "_")in your .emacs file
The last fix obviously customizes ESS permanently for your emacs setup, while the first two allow you to get to underscore using the default ESS setup.
Update: Seth Falcon posted his .emacs on Twitter, which allows C-= to map the assignment operator, and leaves _ alone 
(setq ess-S-assign-key (kbd "C-="))
(ess-toggle-S-assign-key t) ; enable above key definition
;; leave my underscore key alone!
(ess-toggle-underscore nil)
Nice, Seth!!
FYI, ESS is Emacs Speaks Statistics, an emacs addon developed by Tony Rossini and others to enable intelligent editing of statistical scripts in S+, R, SAS and Stata, as well as scripts for the Gibbs Sampling programs BUGS and JAGS, and can be found here
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