Re: PSPPIRE Interactive Mode

[Andy Choens]

John Darrington wrote:
> It's not exactly what you want, but the syntax window does a similar
> thing.  Most (all?) of the dialog boxes have a "Paste" button which
> inserts the syntax into the window.  You can then edit it as you like.
>
>
>   
Based on one of your earlier suggestions, I have been experimenting with 
the pspp-mode for emacs. I'm a little slow with it all, since I have 
very little experience with emacs, but that's OK. As an old vim die-hard 
. . . .  I hate to admit it . . . .  but I am really enjoying emacs. 
(There -- I said it!). With this mode (and my newly created .emacs init 
file) I finally have a linux-based editor that can do the syntax 
highlighting that I want. After using this mode, and reading a bit on 
the Internet, it seems logical to try and fold this work into the ESS 
mode, but there may be lots of reasons for not doing this that I don't 
understand yet. I'm just an emacs noob.

I haven't looked at PSPP's actual code yet, so I'm not too clear on how 
it all works, but it would be interesting if the command pspp could be 
given a remote option, so that it looks for a running instance of pspp / 
psppire. If PSPP/PSPPIRE is already running, pspp wouldn't start a new 
instance of pspp, but would instead become a client of the existing 
process. From there it seems fairly trivial to extend the pspp-mode to 
send syntax / files to eshell running a client pspp.

Either way, I'm having a lot of fun learning emacs and PSPP is an 
incredible tool. I can't wait to see how future editions improve on the 
output window (tables and graphs).

--
Andrew Choens, MSW
Research Policy Analyst
Hornby Zeller Associates, Inc.
(518) 273 - 1614