Stephan Schmitt <address@hidden> writes:
Thomas S. Dye wrote:
Aloha all,
I'm trying to comprehend the possibilities created by org-babel, and
would like to draw on the experience of others if I could.
I recently discovered the buffer created by :session. In my case,
this is an R session that I am building to track the data collection
phase of a research project. I was delighted to find that it
appears to have recorded everything my org file had done in that
session. I have a vague idea that it might be useful to save this
as a log to prove that all the little source blocks in my org file
indeed were called and executed successfully.
I'm wondering: do other org-babelers use the :session buffer? How?
For what purpose?
Hi Tom,
For R users, org-babel is intended to be used in conjunction with
ESS[1]
and personally I continue to use the inferior-ESS mode *R* buffer
(aka R
session buffer) in a similar way to when I was using ESS alone. So for
example
1. In an ess-mode (R) edit buffer, I use the ess-eval-* family of
functions to evaluate lines, regions, etc. In particular, to debug a
code block I switch to an R edit buffer with C-c ', then evaluate
line-by-line using C-c C-n (ess-eval-line-and-step).[2]
2. In an ess-mode (R) edit buffer, I use C-z (ess-switch-to-end-of-
ESS)
to switch to the R session buffer (inferior-ESS mode)
3. In the R session buffer, I try out evaluation of expressions, query
data structure contents with str(), list objects in the environment,
etc.
4. There are many other nice facilities provided by ESS when working
in
an R edit buffer with an associated active R session, such as object
name completion, displaying formal arguments to functions while you
type, etc.
I believe that to some extent you can work in a similar way with
interactive python and ruby sessions but personally I don't have much
experience with that yet. It was always a key aim of org-babel (made
easy by org-mode's C-c ') that it should not get in the way of
whatever
other emacs facilities exist for working with interactive emacs
sessions
in a particular language. Incidentally, maintaining this sort of
automatic compatibility with language-specific software like ESS is
one
reason why I am slightly skeptical about the value of using org-
babel in
a "dual major-mode" fashion as was suggested in a separate thread
today.
Dan
Footnotes:
[1] http://ess.r-project.org/