What is ESS?
Welcome to the home page of the ESS project
Emacs Speaks Statistics (ESS) is an add-on package for GNU Emacs. It is designed to support editing of scripts and interaction with various statistical analysis programs such as R, S-Plus, SAS, Stata and OpenBUGS/JAGS. Although all users of these statistical analysis programs are welcome to apply ESS, advanced users or professionals who regularly work with text-based statistical analysis scripts, with various statistical languages/programs, or with different operating systems might benefit from it the most. The rationale for developing ESS is that most statistical analysis systems provide a more or less sophisticated graphical user interface (GUI). However, their full power is only available using their scripting language. Furthermore, complex statistical analysis projects require a high degree of automation and documentation which can only be handled by creating statistical analysis scripts. Unfortunately, many statistics packages provide only weak text editor functionality and show major differences between them. Without a unified text editor user interface additional effort is required from the user to cope with limited functionality and with text editor differences. Therefore, emacs editors and the ESS package provide the following major features:- Support for various operating systems
Examples: Linux, Unix, Mac OS X and MS Windows - Working environment based on emacs
Examples: File Manager (Dired), File Transfer Client/Telnet Client (Tramp), Multiple Clipboards (registers), Bookmarks, Abbreviations, and many others - Support for various statistical analysis
languages
Examples: R, S-Plus, SAS, Stata and OpenBUGS/JAGS
Examples: Keybindings, Abbreviations, Syntax highlighting, Code formatting, Commenting, Submitting scripts, Displaying results and Searching documentation