ESS – Emacs Speaks Statistics

Changes and New Features in 25.01.0:

polymode: In our transition from literate libraries (such as noweb documented below with respect to 19.04), we now recommend the polymode packages as a more suitable replacement. Furthermore, we suggest the related polymodes including poly-noweb, poly-markdown and poly-R (installed in that order). The package polymode itself, as well as the polymodes packages, are all on MELPA rather than ELPA. Therefore, you need to add MELPA to the list of installation archives as follows. ‘(add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa-stable" . "https://stable.melpa.org/packages/"))’ for M-x package-install
ESS[R]: The shorthand notation for lambda functions and the question mark are now fontified as keywords. Contributed by Maxime Pettinger.
ESS[SAS]: Developed new comprehensive lists of PROCs and functions for syntax highlighting. See etc/proc.sas and etc/func.sas.

Changes and New Features in 24.01.1:

Revert a bug introduced with the ess-request-a-process change

Changes and New Features in 24.01.0:

fix docstring warnings in ess-custom
:package-version is now set to "VERSION" in ess-custom. By make this is replaced with "24.01.0" (or similar).
Better “collaboration” with org-mode. Now ess-request-a-process obeys ess-gen-proc-buffer-name-function, thanks to Ihor Radchenko.

Changes and New Features in 19.04 (unreleased):

ESS[R]: When a background command is interrupted with C-g, ESS now asks the user if they want to disable background evaluations altogether. This is a resiliency measure against cases where background evals cause cascading errors or hangs.
ESS[R]: Background commands now propagate errors to Emacs.
ESS[R]: Background commands can now be disabled by process instad of globally. For instance when a process has failed to initialize properly, background evals are disabled for that particular process to avoid cascading errors. Other processes may still use background commands.
ESS[R]: ESSR commands are now more robust when ESSR is not in scope. This can happen when using browser() in an environment that doesn’t inherit from the search path.
ESS[R]: Unexpected exits are now detected during startup. In that case an error is thrown with advice about how to recover.
ESS[R]: options(width = ) is now set on startup based on the width of the inferior window.
ESS[R]: Add support for R projects and start R by default in the project folder.
ESS[R]: Backticked symbols in the process buffer are no longer fontified as strings.
ESS[R]: ess-command now runs R code in a sandboxed environment. Use .ess.environment() to inspect the current environment.
ESS[R]: Added support for new syntax in R 4.0 and R 4.1. This concerns raw strings, lambda functions, and the pipe operator.
ESS[R]: Highlight error locations in rlang style backtraces
ESS[R]: Fixed issue that caused ESS-help to hang when usage blocks include R comments (#1025). Fix contributed by Bill Evans.
ESS: New ess-elisp-trace-mode minor mode. Toggle it to start or stop tracing all ess-prefixed functions with trace-function. Tracing is useful for debugging background ESS behaviour.
ESS[R]: ess-get-help-aliases-list now caches the aliases on the R side. This should speed up help lookup when the search path has changed and the aliases are read again.
ESS: ess-command now uses a default timeout of 30 seconds. It should normally be avoided with long-running tasks because it causes Emacs to block while the command is running. If the timeout is reached, an error is thrown. An interrupt is also sent to the process in case of early exit.
This is a behaviour change: you will now have to explicitly opt in blocking the whole Emacs UI for more than 30 seconds by supplying a larger timeout (use most-positive-fixnum for infinity).
ESS: ess-wait-for-process now returns nil if a timeout is reached.
ESS: ess-get-words-from-vector gains a timeout argument.
ESS[R]: Fixed performance issue with argument completions. The help summary for the argument is no longer displayed in the echo area. This fixes delays and hangs (#1062).
ESS[R]: ess-command is now more robust and resilient to hangs and custom prompts (#1043). It also strips continuation prompts (+ prompts) automatically and reliably (#1116).
ESS[R]: ess-command now handles sinked consoles correctly.
ESS[R]: ess-command no longer changes .Last.value. As a result, background tasks like completions no longer affect the last value binding (#1058).
ESS[R]: Namespaced evaluation is disable in roxygen examples (#1026). Part of this change is that namespaced evaluation has become a buffer-local rather than process-local setting (#1046). This makes it possible to disable namespaced evaluation in specific buffers or contexts.
iESS: Inferior processes can now properly reuse frames (#987). Fixed issue that caused the current buffer to be incorrectly displayed in the new frame when display-buffer is set to pop up frames.
ESS[R]: Better support for tramp. Fixed package evaluation on remote servers with Tramp (#950); process reloading (#1001); and an evaluation issue (#1024). These fixes were contributed by David Pritchard.
ESS[R]: Automatic offsetting of R process output is now disabled by default because it produces undesirable output in some situations. To re-enable, set inferior-ess-fix-misaligned-output to t.
ESS[R]: Improved xref lookup (M-.). Function locations are now always detected for package libraries listed in ess-r-package-library-paths.
ESS[R]: Evaluated lines starting with the Roxygen prefix are now always stripped from the prefix, so they can be sent to the process easily. Previously, this was only the case inside the examples field. Since roxygen is switching to R markdown, it becomes useful to evaluate chunks of R outside examples.
stata support is now obsolete since we were unable to elicit FSF paperwork from some of the original authors: see the lisp/obsolete sub-directory on the ESS github repo
ess-set-working-directory no longer changes the active directory (as defined by the buffer-local variable default-directory) of the buffer where the command is called. Instead, the active directory of the inferior buffer is updated to the new working directory.
The default of ess-eval-visibly is now 'nowait. With this change you should no longer experience freezes while evaluating code.
ESS[R]: There is a new menu entry for reloading the R process. It is otherwise bound to C-c C-e C-r. Reloading now reuses the same process name and start arguments that were used to start the process.
iESS: Process runners now return the inferior buffer. Note that callers of inferior runners should not assume that the current buffer has been set to the inferior buffer. Instead, use with-current-buffer with the return value of the inferior.
iESS[SAS]: The SAS keymap was only set in iESS buffers called ‘*SAS*‘. This is now fixed.
ESS[R]: Fixed longstanding indentation issues involving :: and ::: operators.
Implement a more reliable check for the process busy state. Background actions such as completion and directory synchronization should not block the process and should not cause printing of the extraneous output to the interpreter.
Activate goto-address-mode for url and email highlighting in inferior buffers.
smart-underscore and ess-smart-S-assign-key have been removed. Users who liked the previous behavior (i.e. underscore inserting “<-”) should bind ess-insert-assign to the underscore in their Emacs initialization file. For example, (define-key ess-r-mode-map "_" #'ess-insert-assign) and (define-key inferior-ess-r-mode-map "_" #'ess-insert-assign) will activate it in all ESS R buffers.
ESS major modes are now defined using ’define-derived-mode’. This makes ESS major modes respect modern conventions such as having <language>-mode-hook and <language>-mode-map. Users are encouraged to place customizations under the appropriate mode.
New option ess-auto-width controls setting the width option on window changes. Users can change it to ’frame, ’window, or an integer. See the documentation for details. ess-auto-width-visible controls visibility.
ESS now respects display-buffer-alist. Users can now use display-buffer-alist to manage how and where windows appear. For more information and examples, see See (ess)Controlling buffer display.
ess-roxy-mode can now be enabled in non-R buffers. This is primarily intended to support roxygen documentation for cpp buffers. Preview functionality is not supported outside R buffers.
ESS[R]: DESCRIPTION files now open in conf-colon-mode.
ess-style now has effects when set as a file or directory local variable.
ess-default-style is now obsolete, use ess-style instead.
Options for ’ess-gen-proc-buffer-name-function’ have been renamed. ess-gen-proc-buffer-name:projectile-or-simple was renamed to ess-gen-proc-buffer-name:project-or-simple and ess-gen-proc-buffer-name:projectile-or-directory was renamed to ess-gen-proc-buffer-name:project-or-directory. As the name suggests, these now rely on project.el (included with Emacs) rather than projectile.el, which is a third-party package.
Eldoc fully honors eldoc-echo-area-use-multiline-p
ESS[R]: ess-r-rhub-check-package gained new RECOMMENDED.
ESS[R]: devtools commands ask about saving modified buffers before running. Users can disable the questioning with ess-save-silently.
ESS[R] help pages now provide links to other help topics. This is similar with what you would see with, for example options(help_type = ``html'') but works with the plain-text version as well. This only works with options(useFancyQuotes = TRUE) (the default).
ess-rdired buffers now derive from tabulated-list-mode. They should look better and be a bit faster overall. The size column now displays object sizes in bytes.
ess-rdired buffers now auto-update. The frequency is governed by the new option ess-rdired-auto-update-interval.
ESS[R]: electric-layout-mode is now supported. This automatically inserts a newline after an opening curly brace in R buffers. To enable it, customize ess-r-mode-hook.
ESS[R]: imenu now supports assignment with the equals sign.
ESS[Rd]: Rd no longer writes abbrevs to user’s abbrev file.
ESS removed support for many unused languages. This includes old versions of S+, ARC, OMG, VST, and XLS.
ess-r-runner-prefixes was modified to find R-4 and later.
ESS no longer activates eldoc if the user has disabled global-eldoc-mode.

The following have been made obsolete or removed, see their documentation for more detail:

Libraries for literate data analysis are obsolete and not loaded by default. This includes ess-noweb, ess-swv, and related functionality like Rnw-mode. Users are encouraged to switch to one of several other packages that deal with these modes. For example, polymode https://github.com/polymode/poly-R/, https://polymode.github.io/, or markdown-mode with edit-indirect https://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode.
Support for auto-complete is obsolete. The auto-complete package is unmaintained and so ESS support is now obsolete. Users are encouraged to switch to company-mode instead.
User options for controlling display of buffers. This includes ess-show-buffer-action, inferior-ess-same-window, inferior-ess-own-frame, and inferior-ess-frame-alist. See above about ESS respecting display-buffer-alist.
Variables ess-tab-always-indent and ess-tab-complete-in-script. Use the Emacs-wide setting of tab-always-indent instead.
inferior-ess-*-start-file variables. All modes except Stata did not respect customization of this variable. In order to load a file on startup, you should put a function on ess-*-post-run-hook.

Bug Fixes in 18.10.3:

More Makefile fixes, notably installing *.els.

Bug Fixes in 18.10.2:

ESS[R] Fix namespace evaluation in non-installed packages. Evaluation is directed into GlobalEnv as originally intended.
Makefile fixes, notably for make install and including full docs in the tarballs.

Bug Fixes in 18.10.1:

New functions ess-eval-line-visibly-and-step (C-c C-n and ess-eval-region-or-line-visibly-and-step (C-RET) which behave as the old versions of ess-eval-line-and-step and ess-eval-region-or-line-and-step.

Changes and New Features in 18.10:

This is the last release to support Emacs older than 25.1. Going forward, only GNU Emacs 25.1 and newer will be supported. Soon after this release, support for older Emacs versions will be dropped from the git master branch. Note that MELPA uses the git master branch to produce ESS snapshots, so if you are using Emacs < 25.1 from MELPA and are unable to upgrade, you should switch to MELPA-stable.
ESS now displays the language dialect in the mode-line. So, for example, R buffers will now show ESS[R] rather than ESS[S].
The ESS manual has been updated and revised.
The ESS initialization process has been further streamlined. If you update the autoloads (which installation from package-install does), you should not need to (require 'ess-site) at all, as autoloads should automatically load ESS when it is needed (e.g. the first time an R buffer is opened). In order to defer loading your ESS config, you may want to do something like (with-require-after-load "ess" <ess-config-here>) in your Emacs init file. Users of the popular use-package Emacs package can now do (use-package ess :defer t) to take advantage of this behavior. For more information on this feature, see See (ess)Activating and Loading ESS.
ESS now respects Emacs conventions for keybindings. This means that The C-c [letter] bindings have been removed. This affects C-c h, which was bound to ess-eval-line-and-step-invisibly in sas-mode-local-map; C-c f, which was bound to ess-insert-function-outline in ess-add-MM-keys; and C-c h, which was bound to ess-handy-commands in Rd-mode-map, ess-noweb-minor-mode-map, and ess-help-mode-map
Functions ess-eval-line-and-step and ess-eval-region-or-line-and-step now behave consistently with other evaluation function inside a package.
ESS[R]: ess-r-package-use-dir now works with any mode. This sets the working directory to the root of the current package including for example C or C++ files within /src).
ESS[R]: Long + + prompts in the inferior no longer offset output.
ESS[R]: New option strip for inferior-ess-replace-long+. This strips the entire + + sequence.
ESS modes now inherit from prog-mode. In the next release, ESS modes will use define-derived-mode so that each mode will have (for example) its own hooks and keymaps.
ESS[R]: Supports flymake in R buffers for Emacs 26 and newer. Users need to install the lintr package to use it. Customizable options include ess-use-flymake, ess-r-flymake-linters, and ess-r-flymake-lintr-cache.
ESS[R]: Gained support for xref in Emacs 25+ See Xref in The Gnu Emacs Reference Manual.
ESS[R]: The startup screen is cleaner. It also displays the startup directory with an explicit setwd().
ESS[R]: Changing the working directory is now always reflected in the process buffer.
ESS[R]: Makevars files open with makefile-mode.
New variable ess-write-to-dribble. This allows users to disable the dribble (*ESS*) buffer if they wish.
All of the *-program-name variables have been renamed to *-program. Users who previously customized e.g. inferior-ess-R-program-name will need to update their customization to inferior-ess-R-program. These variables are treated as risky variables.
ess-smart-S-assign was renamed to ess-insert-assign. It provides similar functionality but for any keybinding, not just ‘_‘. For instance if you bind it to ‘;‘, repeated invocations cycle through between assignment and inserting ‘;‘.
C-c C-= is now bound to ess-cycle-assign by default. See the documentation for details. New user customization option ess-assign-list controls which assignment operators are cycled.
ESS[R] In remote sessions, the ESSR package is now fetched from GitHub.
Commands that send the region to the inferior process now deal with rectangular regions. See the documentation of ess-eval-region for details. This only works on Emacs 25.1 and newer.
ESS[R]: Improvements to interacting with iESS in non-R files. Interaction with inferior process in non-R files within packages (for instance C or C++ files) has been improved. This is a work in progress.
ESS[R]: Changing the working directory is now always reflected in the process buffer.
ESS[JAGS]: *.jog and *.jmd files no longer automatically open in JAGS mode.

Many improvements to fontification:

Improved customization for faces. ESS now provides custom faces for (nearly) all faces used and places face customization options into their own group. Users can customize these options using M-x customize-group RET ess-faces.
Many new keywords were added to ess-R-keywords and ess-R-modifiers. See the documentation for details.
ESS[R]: in is now only fontified when inside a for construct. This avoids spurious fontification, especially in the output buffer where ‘in‘ is a common English word.
ESS: Font-lock keywords are now generated lazily. That means you can now add or remove keywords from variables like ess-R-keywords in your Emacs configuration file after loading ESS (i.e. in the :config section for use-package users).
ESS[R]: Fontification of roxygen @param keywords now supports comma-separated parameters.
ESS[R]: Certain keywords are only fontified if followed by a parenthesis. Function-like keywords such as if () or stop() are no longer fontified as keyword if not followed by an opening parenthesis. The same holds for search path modifiers like library() or require().
ESS[R]: Fixed fontification toggling. Especially certain syntactic elements such as %op% operators and backquoted function definitions.
ESS[R]: ess-font-lock-toggle-keyword can be called interactively. This command asks with completion for a font-lock group to toggle. This functionality is equivalent to the font-lock menu.

Notable bug fixes:

prettify-symbols-mode no longer breaks indentation. This is accomplished by having the pretty symbols occupy the same number of characters as their non-pretty cousins. You may customize the new variable ess-r-prettify-symbols to control this behavior.
ESS: Inferior process buffers are now always displayed on startup. Additionally, they don’t hang Emacs on failures.

Obsolete libraries, functions, and variables:

The ess-r-args.el library has been obsoleted and will be removed in the next release. Use eldoc-mode instead, which is on by default.
Functions and options dealing with the smart assign key are obsolete. The following functions have been made obsolete and will be removed in the next release of ESS: ess-smart-S-assign, ess-toggle-S-assign, ess-toggle-S-assign-key, ess-disable-smart-S-assign.
The variable ess-smart-S-assign-key is now deprecated and will be removed in the next release. If you would like to continue using ‘_‘ for inserting assign in future releases, please bind ess-insert-assign in ess-mode-map the normal way.
ESS[S]: Variable ess-s-versions-list is obsolete and ignored. Use ess-s-versions instead. You may pass arguments by starting the inferior process with the universal argument.

Changes and New Features in 17.11:

The ESS initialization process has been streamlined. You can now load the R and Stata modes independently from the rest of ESS. Just put (require 'ess-r-mode) or (require 'ess-stata-mode) in your init file. This is for experienced Emacs users as this requires setting up autoloads for .R files manually. We will keep maintaining ess-site for easy loading of all ESS features.
Reloading and quitting the process is now more robust. If no process is attached, ESS now switches automatically to one (prompting you for selection if there are several running). Reloading and quitting will now work during a debug session or when R is prompting for input (for instance after a crash). Finally, the window configuration is saved and restored after reloading to prevent the buffer of the new process from capturing the cursor.
ESS[R]: New command ess-r-package-use-dir. It sets the working directory of the current process to the current package directory.
ESS[R] Lookup for references in inferior buffers has been improved. New variable ess-r-package-source-roots contains package sub-directories which are searched recursively during the file lookup point. Directories in ess-tracebug-search-path are now also searched recursively.
ESS[R] Namespaced evaluation is now automatically enabled only in the R/ directory. This way ESS will not attempt to update function definitions from a package if you are working from e.g. a test file.

Changes and New Features in 16.10:

ESS[R]: Syntax highlighting is now more consistent. Backquoted names are not fontified as strings (since they really are identifiers). Furthermore they are now correctly recognized when they are function definitions or function calls.
ESS[R]: Backquoted names and %op% operators are recognized as sexp. This is useful for code navigation, e.g. with C-M-f and C-M-b.
ESS[R]: Integration of outline mode with roxygen examples fields. You can use outline mode’s code folding commands to fold the examples field. This is especially nice to use with well documented packages with long examples set. Set ess-roxy-fold-examples to non-nil to automatically fold the examples field when you open a buffer.
ESS[R]: New experimental feature: syntax highlighting in roxygen examples fields. This is turned off by default. Set ess-roxy-fontify-examples to non-nil to try it out.
ESS[R]: New package development command ess-r-devtools-ask bound to C-c C-w C-a. It asks with completion for any devtools command that takes pkg as argument.
ESS[R]: New command C-c C-e C-r to reload the inferior process. Currently only implemented for R. The R method runs inferior-ess-r-reload-hook on reloading.
ESS[R]: ess-r-package-mode is now activated in non-file buffers as well.

Bug fixes in 16.10:

ESS[R]: Fix broken (un)flagging for debugging inside packages
ESS[R]: Fixes (and improvements) in Package development
ESS[R]: Completion no longer produces ...= inside list( ).
ESS[R]: Better debugging and tracing in packages.
ESS[R]: Better detection of symbols at point.
ESS[R]: No more spurious warnings on deletion of temporary files.
ESS[julia]: help and completion work (better)
ESS[julia]: available via ess-remote

Changes and New Features in 16.04:

ESS[R]: developer functionality has been refactored. The new user interface consists of a single command ess-r-set-evaluation-env bound by default to C-c C-t C-s. Once an evaluation environment has been set with, all subsequent ESS evaluation will source the code into that environment. By default, for file within R packages the evaluation environment is set to the package environment. Set ess-r-package-auto-set-evaluation-env to nil to disable this.
ESS[R]: New ess-r-package-mode This development mode provides features to make package development easier. Currently, most of the commands are based on the devtools packages and are accessible with C-c C-w prefix. See the documentation of ess-r-package-mode function for all available commands. With C-u prefix each command asks for extra arguments to the underlying devtools function. This mode is automatically enabled in all files within R packages and is indicated with [pkg:NAME] in the mode-line.
ESS[R]: Help lookup has been improved. It is now possible to get help for namespaced objects such as pkg::foobar. Furthermore, ESS recognizes more reliably when you change options('html_type').
ESS[R]: New specialized breakpoints for debugging magrittr pipes
ESS: ESS now implements a simple message passing interface to communicate between ESS and inferior process.

Bug fixes in 16.04:

ESS[R]: Roxygen blocks with backtics are now correctly filled
ESS[R]: Don’t skip breakpoints in magrittr’s debug_pipe
ESS[R]: Error highlighting now understands ‘testthat‘ type errors
ESS[Julia]: Added getwd and setwd generic commands

Changes and New Features in 15.09:

ESS[R]: The indentation logic has been refactored. It should be faster, more consistent and more flexible. There are three types of indentation settings, those starting with ess-offset- give the actual offsets, those starting with ess-indent- are control (commonly Boolean) variables, and those starting with ess-align- are vertical alignment overrides which inhibit default offsets in specific situations. See ess-style-alist for detailed description of the new indentation system and provided default indentation styles.
ESS[R]: Deprecation of old indentation settings. As a consequence of the indentation re-factoring ess-brace-imaginary-offset, ess-expression-offset and all delimiter-specific offsets are deprecated. The settings for indentation of continued statements have been replaced by ess-offset-continuations. It can be set to either cascade or straight (the default). ess-arg-function-offset has been replaced by ess-indent-from-lhs and has been generalised to assignments. This setting now works with both statement blocks and expressions and only takes effect for offsets set to prev-call and open-delim in order to produce a consistent indentation.
ESS: A test framework has been set up.
ESS[R]: A new RStudio style is provided to mimic as closely as possible R files indented via RStudio. To reproduce the setup of some of the RStudio users, the RStudio- style with ess-offset-arguments set to prev-line is also provided. In addition, the new RRR+ style is equivalent to RRR except it indents blocks in function calls relatively to the opening delimiter. This style does not try to save horizontal space and produces more indentation.
ESS[R]: Roxygen fields will now be indented on paragraph refilling in order to make the documentation more readable. You can also refill commented lines in the examples field without squashing the surrounding code in the comments.
ESS[R]: ESS can now format your code! This is controlled through the settings ess-fill-calls and ess-fill-continuations. When activated, (fill-paragraph) formats your calls and your formulas/continuations while making sure they don’t go past fill-column. Repeated refills cycle through different styles (see the docstrings for more details). By default, the refilled region blinks. Set ess-blink-filling to nil to prevent this.
ESS[R]: Fix occasional missing error location fontification in inferior buffers.
ESS[R]: ess-developer now correctly assigned the environment of new functions to the package namespace.
ESS[Julia]: ?[topic] now works in the *julia* buffer. Note that support for editing Julia code now depends on julia-mode.el from the Julia project. If you install ESS from the official tarball/zip file, julia-mode.el is already included. Otherwise, if you install ESS by running make, then the latest version of julia-mode.el is downloaded (and so you need an active internet connection to install) during the installation process. Alternatively, if you run ESS without running make, then ensure that you have the julia-mode.el, which you can get easily from MELPA for example.
iESS: For naming inferior processes, ESS can use projectile’s project root and it does so when ess-gen-proc-buffer-name-function is set to ess-gen-proc-buffer-name:projectile-or-simple as by default, or to another value beginning with ess-gen-proc-buffer-name:projectile-*.

Changes and New Features in 15.03-1:

ESS[R]: An indentation bug has been fixed (github issue 163)
ESS[R]: On windows, if ‘ess-prefer-higher-bit’ is non-nil (the default), then R-newest will try to run a 64 bit (rather than 32 bit) version of R.

Changes and New Features in 15.03:

ESS[R]: Full native support for ‘company-mode‘.
ESS[R]: More efficient caching algorithm for R completion.
ESS: New offset variable ‘ess-close-paren-offset‘ to control the indentation of the closing parentheses.
ESS[R]: Ask for CRAN mirror only once per emacs session.
ESS[R]: Detect library and require calls for better completion caching.
Buffer display is now customizable (ess-show-buffer-action).
Use y-or-n-p instead of yes-or-no-p throughout.
More support for ODS in ess-sas-graph-view.
Makefiles are now both UNIX and GNU friendly.
ESS[R]: Simplify directory lookup in ess-developer (#137).
Make closed paren indentation consistent

Bug Fixes in 15.03:

Fix open brace indentation bug (#27 in ess/R-ESS-bugs.R).
Fix git version lookup
Don’t check directory modtime in R dialect.
Declare all ess macros for edebug.
Add ess-smart-comma to eldoc message functions.
Inform users when retrieving RDA aliases.
Line ending in ’~’ is also a continuation line.
Filing roxy paragraphs works as expected now.
In ess-developer-add-package, remove incorrect ‘wait‘ argument from ess-get-words-from-vector call.
Fix #96, #117, #120, #125, #134, #137.
Fix ess-quit-r. Call base::q() even if it is masked.
Fix ‘ess-show-buffer‘ to always display the buffer in another window.
Makefile: Fix cd bug for directories with spaces in them
ess-kill-buffer-and-go modified to not restart R

Changes / Selected Bug Fixes in 14.09:

ESS[Julia]: Executable is changed to julia.
ESS[Julia]: Completion and help system was adjusted to Julia v.0.3.0. Julia v.0.2.x is no more supported.
ESS[R]: Running R with gdb debugger now works as expected
iESS: Inferior ESS buffers are now derived from comint-mode
ESS[R]: ess-execute-screen-options uses correct screen width in terminal sessions
ESS: ess-build-tags-for-directory works when no TAGS file name was provided
ESS: ess-offset-statement-continued is now respected everywhere except inside of the if test condition.
ESS: New variable ess-offset-statement-first-continued for indentation of the first line in multiline statements.
ESSR: Starting , in multiline statements indentation is now ignored to achieve a more pleasant alignment.
ESSR: Improved behavior of RET in roxygen blocks.
ESS[R]: command cleaning with C-u C-u C-y was broken with lines containing " + "
ESS[R]: fixed "empty watch window bug"
ESS[R]: don’t ask for help location on ac-quick-help (request of github #81)
ESS[R]: "importClassesFrom" and "importMethodsFrom" were added to the list of two-parameter roxygen commands
ESS[R]: fix vignetes display and hyperlinks (were broken in 13.09-1)
ESS[Julia]: recognize function names ending with !
ESS[Julia]: fix indentation of "for" comprehension syntax within brackets.

Changes / Selected Bug Fixes in 13.09-1:

ess-remote and TRAMP: R support code is now downloaded in binary form instead of being injected from local machine. The R code is stored in ~/.config/ESSR/ directory on the remote machine
TRAMP: PAGER environment variable is now correctly set to inferior-ess-pager
retrieval of help topics on remote machines is fixed
org-babel: source references of R code executed from org files correctly point to source references in original org files (version 8.2.1 or higher of org-mode is required for this feature)
ess-execute is now bound to C-c C-e C-e in ess-extra-map.
completion works again in ess-execute
ESS[R]: head and tail methods were replaced by .ess_htsummary in ess-R-describe-object-at-point-commands
ESS[roxygen]: evaluation commands now work in roxygen blocks. Leading comments are automatically removed before the evaluation
ESS[transcript]: ’Clean Region’ now works with multiline statements; ess-transcript-clean-region etc. correctly treat multiline statements, i.e., no longer forgets the lines typically preceded by ’+’
ESS[SAS]: Three features/fixes with special thanks to Matthew Fidler https://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS/pulls/mlf176f2. Turn on SAS log mode when appropriate. Indent comments and CARDS statement more appropriately.
ESS[SAS]: ess-sas-edit-keys-toggle default returns to nil
ESS[R]: support for prettify-symbols-mode: contribution from Rudiger Sonderfeld https://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS/pull/65
ESS[SWV]: knitr now evaluates in the current frame
ESS[developer]: ess-developer doesn’t kill open DESCRIPTION files anymore
ESS[roxygen]: ess-roxy-preview-HTML is now on C-c C-o C-w and ess-roxy-preview-text is now on C-c C-o C-t
ESS: installation with make install was simplified and should work out of the box on most *nix systems
ESS installation instructions simplified
fixed font-lock bug introduced in 13.09 that was causing very slow process output

Changes/New Features in 13.09:

font-lock in process buffers doesn’t "spill" over prompts. Missing closing string delimiters should not cause wrong fontification of the following command input.
ESS[julia]: full features M-TAB completion and auto-complete support, which now works for modules, structures and data types.
ESS[julia]: a much better eldoc showing arguments of methods and data type constructors
ESS-developer:
- ESS-developer work-flow pattern has been streamlined: ESS-developer is now automatically activated on per-file basis if the file is part of a developed package ess-developer-packages. The old behavior (activation on per-process basis) is still available on M-x ess-developer in a process buffer.
- integration with devtools package. New command ess-developer-load-package calls load_all on the package containing current file. ess-developer-add-package now offers IDO menu completions with available loading methods, currently library, and load_all. Loading command can be customized with ess-developer-load-on-add-commands.
TAB now indents region if region is active (a contribution of Matthew Fidler in pull #41)
M-x ess-version now reports full loading path and recognizes git and ELPA versions.
warning and error keyword are now highlighted with font-lock-warning-face as they should be, (for quite some time these keywords have been hijacked by compilation mode fontification).
eldoc: Eldoc now recognizes multiple processes. If current process is busy, or current buffer is not associated with a process, eldoc picks its completions from the first available free process.
org-babel: evaluation is now org-friendly
help: new help buffers now try to reuse ess-help buffers. This behavior is controlled by ess-help-reuse-window custom variable.
help: ?foo pops IDO menu on multiple help files (so far it worked only for C-c C-v)
remote evaluation is considerably faster now on slow connections
ESS[R] tracebug R source references regular expressions are (mostly) language agnostic.
ess-function-call-face inherits from font-lock-function-name-face rather than font-lock-builtin-face.
ess-inject-source now accepts function-and-buffer option.
Documentation: The “New Features” section (and NEWS) now represent recent changes: within the last year or so. All changes can be found in the new news.html (or NEWS and ONEWS).
ESS[R] ess-rep-regexp should no longer inf.loop (rarely!), and hence M-x ess-fix-miscellaneous should neither.

Changes/New Features in 13.05:

ESS[gretl]: Support for gretl (both editing and sub-process interaction). A contribution of Ahmadou Dicko.
ESS: process output display is 4-10 times faster due to new caching and only occasional emacs re-display (for the moment this functionality is available only when ess-tracebug is active).
ESS: C-c ` is now bound to ess-show-traceback and C-c ~ is bound to ess-show-call-stack.
ESS[R]: ESS stores function in ’ESSR’ environment to avoid kludging users’ global environment and accidental deletion.
ESS[R]: new variable ess-swv-processing-command to control weaving and tangling.
ESS[R]: ess-default-style has been changed (from DEFAULT) to RRR. Use something like (setq ess-default-style 'DEFAULT) or (setq ess-indent-level 2) in your ~/.emacs equivalent before loading ESS, if you do not like this new “incompatible” default style.
ESS[julia]: ESS stores its functions in ’ESS’ module.
ESS[julia]: Eldoc is now supported in julia modes
ESS[julia]: Adjusted error reference detection and interactive help to julia internal changes
ESS[R]: ess-use-tracebug’s default has been changed to t. Set it to nil if you want to keep the previous behavior.
ESS[tracebug]: Electric debug keys have been removed [breaking change] The functionality was replaced with ess-debug-minor-mode and ess-debug-minor-mode-map.
ESS[tracebug]: ess-tracebug-map is an alias to ess-dev-map C-c C-t.
ESS[tracebug]: ess-bp-toggle-state (C-c C-t o) can now be used during the debug session to toggle breakpoints on the fly (suggestion by Ross Boylan).
ESS[tracebug]: ess-debug-flag-for-debugging and ess-debug-unflag-for-debugging work correctly from the debugging contexts. These commands also recognize non-exported functions for the packages listed in ess-developer-packages (C-c C-t C-a).
ESS[R]: Eldoc (activated by ess-use-eldoc) has become more sophisticated, and hence also more intruding in the interface between the Statistics software, e.g., R, and the user.
Note that you can turn off ElDoc, by placing (setq ess-use-eldoc nil) in your ~/.emacs file, prior to loading ESS,
ESS[SAS]: long over-looked SAS-mode-hook appears!
ESS[SAS]: ess-sas-edit-keys-toggle now defaults to t since sas-indent-line is still broken, i.e. TAB is now bound to ess-sas-tab-to-tab-stop by default

Changes/Bug Fixes in 12.09-2:

ESS: new ess-switch-to-end-of-proc-buffer variable that controls whether C-c C-z switches to the end of process buffer. The default is t. You can use prefix argument to C-c C-z to toggle this variable.
ESS: fix in ess-eval-linewise that was causing emacs to hang during R debugging with ess-eval-visibly equal to t.
ESS: fix in ess-eval-linewise that was causing emacs to recenter the prompt in visible window
ESS[tracebug]: A better handling of “Selection” prompts and debug related singlekey commands.
ESS: fix a bug in ess-switch-process that was causing *new* selection to fail.
ESS[R]: Solve missing ess-local-process-name bug in R-dired.
ESS[SWV]: ess-swv-PDF doesn’t ask for a command to run if there is only one command in ess-swv-pdflatex-commands.
ESS[SWV]: ess-swv-weave gained an universal argument to allow for an interactive choice between available weavers (sweave, knitr).
ESS: ess-eval-*-and-step functions go to next empty line at eob, instead of staying at the last line.

Changes/New Features in 12.09-1:

ESS Breaking Changes in Keys:
- New keymaps: ess-doc-map bound to C-c C-d; ess-extra-map bound to C-c C-e; ess-dump-object-into-edit-buffer was moved on C-c C-e C-d
- roxygen map was moved on C-c C-o and ess-roxy-update-entry now resides on C-c C-o C-o
- ess-handy-commands is not bound anymore
- ess-dev-map (including ess-tracebug and ess-developer) moved on C-c C-t
- C-c C-y is deprecated in favor of C-c C-z C-z
ESS[R] new command ess-describe-object-at-point bound to C-c C-d C-e (repeat C-e or e to cycle). It was inspired by Erik Iverson’s ess-R-object-tooltip. Customize ess-describe-at-point-method to use tooltip instead of an electric buffer.
ESS: New command ess-build-tags-for-directory bound to C-c C-e C-t for building dialect specific tag tables. After building tags use M-. to navigate to function and objects definitions. By default C-c C-e C-t builds tags based on imenu regular expressions and also include other common languages .c, .o, .cpp etc. But it relies on external find and etags commands. If ess-build-tags-command is defined (for R), the inferior process is asked to build tags instead.
ESS: ess-switch-process offers *new* alternative to start a new process instead of switching to one of the currently running processes.
ESS: Switching between processes (C-c C-s) uses buffer names instead of the internal process names. Use M-x rename-buffer command to conveniently rename your process buffers.
ESS: Process buffers can be automatically named on process creation according to user specified scheme. Default schemes are *proc*, *proc:dir* and *proc:abbr-long-dir* where proc stands for the internal process name and dir stands for the directory where the process was started in. The default is *proc*. For customization see ess-gen-proc-buffer-name-function.
ESS: ess-eval-visibly-p is deprecated in favor of ess-eval-visibly.
ESS: New evaluation pattern nowait. In addition to old nil and t values, ess-eval-visibly accepts nowait for a visible evaluation with no waiting for the process. See ess-eval-visibly for details on evaluation patterns.
ESS: New “Process” menu entry with process related commands and configuration
iESS: Process buffer is now automatically shown on errors
ESS: New ess-switch-to-inferior-or-script-buffer command bound to C-c C-z in both script and process buffers. If invoked form process buffer it switches to the most recent buffer of the same dialect. It is a single key command.
ESSR-help: On multiple help pages with the same name, C-c C-v now asks for user resolution directly in emacs.
ESS[R] ess-roxy: new variable ess-roxy-re for fontification of cases where the number of leading # differs from ess-roxy-str.
ESS[R] Eldoc was considerably enhanced. It now finds hidden default S3 methods and displays non-default methods’ arguments after trailing ||.
ESS[R]: New ess-display-demos command bound to C-c C-d o and C-c C-d C-o
ESS: New ess-help-web-search command bound to C-c C-d w and C-c C-d C-w to facilitate interactive search of web resources. Implemented for R, Stata and Julia. See also ess-help-web-search-command.
ESS: ess-pdf-viewer-pref accepts now command line arguments
ESS[Rnw]: Add knitr support. Customize ess-swv-processor for the default processor.
ESS[Rnw]: More thorough renaming of remaining noweb-* to ess-noweb-*.
ESS[Rnw] new commands ess-eval-chunk-and-step and ess-eval-chunk bound to M-n C-c and M-n C-M-x to mirror standard ess commands in C-c map.
ESS[R] Auto-completion: new variable ess-ac-R-argument-suffix to customize the insertion of trailing "=". Defaults to “ = “.
ESS[Julia]: Added index, apropos and web-search to julia.
ESS help: More evaluation commands were added to ess-help mode (C-c C-c, C-M-x etc)

Bug Fixes in 12.09-1:

iESShelp: Multiple help pages with the same name are properly handled on C-c C-v
iESSremote: Evaluation with ESS remote no longer freezes emacs.
iESS: comint-previous-prompt C-c C-p no longer stops on secondary prompt “+”.
iESS[R], iESS(Sqpe) [S] on Windows: The options("editor") is now initialized to emacsclient instead of the previous gnuclient. The user may need to add the line (server-start) to the emacs initialization file. emacsclient has been included with emacs since GNU Emacs 22.1.
ESS[Rnw] Fixed “connection to R” bug (in 12.09 only).
ESS[Rnw] Explicit ess-swv-stangle and ess-swv-sweave functions.
ESS[Rnw] Fixed completion and smart underscore problems cause by unmatched “\”’
ESS[R] is more careful with the R code injection. It now happens only once at the start of the session.
ESS[R]: Fixed auto-scrolling the comint buffer on evaluation.
ESS[Julia]: Solve several indentation and word navigation problems.
ESS[Julia]: Help system works again.

Changes/New Features in 12.09:

Due to XEmacs lacking some features that ESS requires, ESS support of XEmacs ends with ESS 12.04-4. This decision will be re-visited in the future as XEmacs continues to sync with GNU Emacs.
ESS[R]: On Windows, there is now a new customizable variable (currently called ess-directory-containing-R) to tell ESS where to look for the Rterm.exe executables. The name of the variable and the values it can take are both in beta and subject to change. Prior to this variable, ESS searched only in the default installation directory. Setting this variable now tells ESS how to find Rterm.exe executables when they are installed somewhere else.
ESS[julia]: new mode for editing julia code (*.jl). Start with M-x julia.
Full interaction interface, imenu and basic error referencing are available.
ESS[R] noweb: noweb-mode and noweb-font-lock-mode have been renamed to ess-noweb-mode and ess-noweb-font-lock-mode to avoid conflicts with the “real” noweb-mode.
ESS[R] noweb: The long standing font-lock bug has been solved in ess-noweb interface.
ESS: Basic evaluation keys are now bound to ess-eval-region-*- functions:
- C-M-x is bound to ess-eval-region-or-function-or-paragraph
- C-c C-c is bound to ess-eval-region-or-function-or-paragraph-and-step
- C-RET is bound to ess-eval-region-or-line-and-step
Each of these functions first evaluates the region whenever the region is active.
ESS: C-M-a/C-M-e now step to beginning/end of paragraph if no function has been detected.
ESS: ess-eval-*-and-step family of functions are now smarter, and don’t step to end of buffer or end of chunk code (@) when at the end of the code.
ESS: ess-handy-commands function is bound to C-c h
ESS: ESS is now blinking the evaluated region. Set ess-blink-region to nil to deactivate; ess-blink-delay gives the duration of the blink. Evaluated region is “blinked” in highlight face.
ESS[R-help] New key a for “apropos()” in help buffers. Also available through C-c h.
ESS[R-help] All R commands of type foo?bar and foo??bar are recognized and redirected into appropriate *ESS-help* buffers.
ESS[R]: New customization interface for font-lock.
ESS font-lock operates with predefined keywords. Default keywords are listed in ess-R-font-lock-keywords and inferior-R-font-lock-keywords, which see. The user can easily customize those by adding new keywords. These variables can also be interactively accessed and saved through ESS/Font-lock submenu.

Several new fontification keywords have been added. Most notably the keywords for highlighting of function calls, numbers and operators.
ESS[R]: auto-complete is now activated by default whenever auto-complete package is detected. Set ess-use-auto-complete to nil to deactivate.
ESS[R]: R AC sources are no longer auto-starting at 0 characters but at the default ac-auto-start characters.
ESS no longer redefines default ac-sources, but only appends ac-source-filename to it.
ESS: ac-source-R now concatenates “ = “ to function arguments.
ESS: Menus for ESS and iESS have been reorganized and enriched with Tracebug and Developer submenus.
ESS[R]: ess-developer and ess-tracebug commands are available by default in ess-dev-map which is bound to C-c d in ESS and iESS maps.
ESS[R]: eldoc truncates long lines whenever eldoc-echo-area-use-multiline-p is non-nil (the default). Set this variable to t if you insist on multiline eldoc. See also ess-eldoc-abbreviation-style.
ESS[R]: completion code pre-caches arguments of heavy generics such as plot and print to eliminated the undesirable delay on first request.
iESS: Prompts in inferior buffers are now highlighted uniformly with comint-highlight-prompt face.
ESS[R]: R process no longer wait for the completion of input in inferior buffer. Thus, long running commands like Sys.sleep(5) no longer stall emacs.
ESS: [R, S, Stata, Julia] have specialized ess-X-post-run-hooks, which are run at the end of subprocess initialization.
ESS[Stata]: All interactive evaluation commands work as expected. On-line comments are removed before the evaluation and multiline comments are skipped on C-c C-c and other interactive commands.
ESS no longer auto-connects to a subprocess with a different dialect than the current buffer’s one.
ESS: ess-arg-function-offset-new-line is now a list for all the ESS indentation styles, which results in the following indentation after an open “(”:
```
  a <- some.function(other.function(
     arg1,
     arg2)
```
ESS[SAS]: Improved MS RTF support for GNU Emacs; try ess-sas-rtf-portrait and ess-sas-rtf-landscape.

Changes/Bug Fixes in 12.04-3:

ESS: basic support for package.el compatibility
ESS[R]: correct indentation of & and | continuation lines
M-x ess-version shows the svn revision even after make install
ESS[SAS]: improved XEmacs support
iESS[R]: better finding of previous prompt
ESS[Stata]: adjusted prompt for mata mode
ESS[R]: resolved name clashes with cl.el
ESS[R]: removed dependence on obsolete package assoc
New make target lisp, to build the Lisp-only part, i.e., not building the docs.

Changes/New Features in 12.04-1:

iESS[Stata]: New interactive help invocation.
iESS[Stata]: New custom variable inferior-STA-start-file.
iESS[Stata]: inferior-STA-program-name is now “stata” and can be customized.
ESS[Stata] New sections in stata help files Syntax(s-S), Remarks(r), Title(t).

Bug Fixes in 12.04-1:

ESS[R]: Better ess-tracebug error handling.
ESS[R]: Corrected ess-eldoc help string filtering and improved argument caching.
ESS[R]: Indentation of non-block if/else/for/while lines fixed.
M-x ess-version should work better.
ESS: Filename completion now again works inside strings.
iESS[Stata]: Fixed prompt detection issue.
ESS[Rd]: R is autostarted also from here, when needed.

Changes/New Features in 12.04:

ESS: Reverting new behavior of 12.03, TAB in ess-mode no longer completes by default. If you want smart TAB completion in R and S scripts, similarly to iESS behavior, set the variable ess-tab-complete-in-script to t. Also see ess-first-tab-never-complete for how to customize where first TAB is allowed to complete.
ESS: completion is consistently bound to M-TAB (aka M-C-i) in both Emacs23 and Emacs24.
ESS: The variable ess-arg-function-offset-new-line introduced in ESS(12.03) now accepts a list with the first element a number to indicate that the offset should be computed from the indent of the previous line. For example setting it to ’(2) results in:
```
  a <- some.function(
    arg1,
    arg2)
```

Changes/New Features in 12.03:

ESS indentation: new offset variable ess-arg-function-offset-new-line controlling for the indentation of lines immediately following open ’(’. This is useful to shift backwards function arguments after a long function call expression:
```
  a <- some.function(
         arg1,
         arg2)
```
instead of the old
```
  a <- some.function(
                     arg1,
                     arg2)
```
If ’(’ is not followed by new line the behavior is unchanged:
```
  a <- some.function(arg1,
                     arg2)
```
This variable should be set as part of indentation style lists, or in ess-mode hook.
ESS[R]: C-c . sets (indentation) style.
ESS: In ESS buffers yank(C-y) command accepts double argument C-u C-u to paste commands only. It deletes any lines not beginning with a prompt, and then removes the prompt from those lines that remain. Useful to paste code from emails, documentation, inferior ESS buffers or transcript files.
Documentation: ESS user manual has been rearranged and completed with several new chapters and sections to reflect newly added features (“Completion”, “Developing with ESS”, “ESS tracebug”, “ESS developer”, “ESS ElDoc”, “IDO Completion” and “Evaluating Code”)
RefCard: Reference card was updated to include new features.
Eldoc: Eldoc was rewritten and is activated by default. See ess-use-eldoc, ess-eldoc-show-on-symbol, ess-eldoc-abbreviation-style variables for how to change the default behavior. Note: skeleton-pair-insert-maybe prohibits eldoc display, on ( insertion.
ESS[R]: Eldoc shows arguments of a generic function whenever found.
ESS: TAB in ess-mode now indents and completes, if there is nothing to indent. Set ess-first-tab-never-completes-p to t to make TAB never complete on first invocation. Completion mechanism is similar to the completion in the inferior-ess-mode – a filename expansion is tried, if not found ESS completes the symbol by querying the process.
ESS for emacs version 24 or higher: ESS is fully compatible with the emacs 24 completion scheme, i.e. all the completion is done by completion-at-point. Also in accordance with emacs conventions, ESS doesn’t bind M-TAB for emacs 24 or higher. M-TAB calls the default complete-symbol.
ESS[R]: Out of the box integration with Auto Completion mode http://cx4a.org/software/auto-complete . Three AC sources ac-source-R-args, ac-source-R-objects and ac-source-R are provided. The last one combines the previous two and makes them play nicely together. Set ess-use-auto-complete to t to start using it. Refer to documentation string of ac-use-auto-complete for further information.
ESS[R]: New unified and fast argument completion system, comprised of ess-funname.start, ess-function-arguments, ess-get-object-at-point. Eldoc and auto-completion integration are using this system.
ESS: ess-switch-to-end-of-ESS(C-c C-z), and ess-switch-to-ESS(C-c C-y): Automatically start the process whenever needed.
ESS[R]: roxy knows about previewing text version of the documentation. Bound to C-c C-e t.
ESS[R]: Solved the “nil filename” bug in roxygen support.
ESS[R]: ess-tracebug is now part of ESS:
New Features:
- Source injection: Tracebug now can inject source references on the fly during code evaluation, i.e. you don’t have to source your file, but just evaluate your code in normal fashion. Variable ess-tracebug-inject-source-p controls this behavior - if t, always inject source reference, if 'function, inject only for functions (this is the default), if nil, never inject.
  During the source injection the value of ess-eval-visibly is ignored.
- Org-mode support: Visual debugger is now aware of the temporary org source editing buffer (C-c ') and jumps through this buffers if still alive, or in original org buffer otherwise.
- New keys in watch mode: ? and d
- Two new hooks: ess-tracebug-enter-hook and ess-tracebug-exit-hook
ESS[R]: New package ess-developer to evaluate R code directly in the package environment and namespace. It can be toggled on and off with C-c d t. When ess-developer is on all ESS evaluation commands are redefined to evaluate code in appropriate environments. Add package names to the list of your development packages with C-d a, and remove with C-d r. Source the current file with C-d s.Evaluation function which depend on `ess-eval-region' ask for the package to source the code into, ess-eval-function and alternatives search for the function name in the development packages’ environment and namespace and insert the definition accordingly. See the documentation section “Developing with ESS/ESS developer” for more details.
ESS[R] help system:
New Features:
- q quits window instead of calling ess-switch-to-end-of-ESS. This is consistent with emacs behavior help and other special buffers (breaking change).
- k kills window without asking for the name (pointed by Sam Steingold)
- Help map inherits from special-mode-map as suggested by Sam Steingold.
- Package index: new function ess-display-index bound to i in help mode map.
- Package vignettes: new function ess-display-vignettes bound to v in help mode map.
- Display help in HTML browser: new function ess-display-help-in-browser bound to w in help mode map. It depends on R’s browser option.
- New custom variable ess-help-pop-to-buffer: if non-nil ESS help buffers are given focus on display. The default is t (breaking change).
- New menu entries for the above functions.
- Bogus help buffers are no longer generated by default, i.e. buffers of the form “No documentation for ’foo’ in specified packages and libraries: you could try ’??foo’ ”. ess-help-kill-bogus-buffers now defaults to t. Beware, there may be instances where the default is unsatisfactory such as debugging and/or during R development. Thanks to Ross Boylan for making the suggestion, Sam Steingold for reminding us of this variable and Martin Maechler for the warning.
ESS now uses IDO completing read functionality for all the interactive requests. It uses ido completion mechanism whenever available, and falls back on classical completing-read otherwise. You can set ess-use-ido to nil if you don’t want the IDO completion. See the documentation string of ess-use-ido for more information about IDO and ESS configuration.
ESS[S]: “,“ is bound to ess-smart-comma: If comma is invoked at the process marker of an ESS inferior buffer, request and execute a command from `ess-handy-commands' list. If ess-R-smart-operators is t `ess-smart-comma also inserts “ “ after comma.
ESS[S], notably R: Variable `ess-handy-commands' stores an alist of useful commands which are called by ess-smart-comma in the inferior buffer.
Currently containing:

change-directory

ess-change-directory

help-index

ess-display-index

help-object

ess-display-help-on-object

vignettes

ess-display-vignettes

objects[ls]

ess-execute-objects

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 completion 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.
ESS: New dynamic mode line indicator: Process status is automatically reflected in all mode-lines of associated with the process buffers. Particularly useful for displaying debug status of ess-tracebug and developer status of ess-developer in all associated buffers.
ESS: New ess-completing-read mechanism: ESS uses ido completions whenever possible. Variable ess-use-ido controls whether to use ido completion or not. Active by default.
ESS now supports comint fields for output and input detection. This feature is not used by default, but might be useful in the future.
ESS[S]: New custom variable inferior-ess-S-prompt to customize prompt detection regular expression in the inferior ESS buffers. You can customize this variable to enhance comint navigation (comint-previous-prompt and comint-next-prompt) the inferior buffers.
ESS[R]: Internal R completion retrieval (ess-R-complete-object-name) was rewritten and is faster now.
ESS is using process plist to store process specific variables, as opposed to buffer local variables as it was using before. The use of buffer local variables to store process variables is discouraged.
ESS: new functions to manipulate process plists: ess-process-get and ess-process-set.
ESS: Internal process waiting mechanism was completely rewritten. ESS no more relies on prompt regular expressions for the prompt detection. The only requirement on the primary process prompt is to end in > . This could be overwritten by setting inferior-ess-primary-prompt.
ESS[S], notably R: Saved command history: ess-history-file now accepts t (default), nil, or a file name. By setting it to nil no command line history is saved anymore. ess-history-directory now allows to have the history all saved in one “central” file.
ESS[R]: more Roxygen improvements.
ESS[R]: C-c . to set (indentation) style.
ESS[R]: Functions with non-standard names (for example ’aaa-bbb:cc’) are properly handled by font-lock and evaluation routines.
ESS[R]:Several regexp bugs (described in etc/R-ESS-bugs.el) were fixed in ess-get-words-from-vector and ess-command.

Changes/New Features in 5.14:

ESS[BUGS/JAGS]: Batch BUGS is back! For recent OpenBUGS versions, 3.0.8+, a batch BUGS script is once again available, but for Linux only. Therefore, since it seems that BUGS and JAGS must co-exist (rather than a transition from BUGS to JAGS), .bug files are now in ESS[BUGS] mode and .jag files are in ESS[JAGS] mode. ESS[BUGS] now works like ESS[JAGS] rather than the original mode ESS[BUGS] mode which was difficult to maintain. Although, ESS[BUGS] appears to work, there still may be some features missing as well as bugs.
ESS[R]: New customizable variable ess-swv-plug-into-AUCTeX-p Commands to Sweave current file and LaTeX the result are now available to AUCTeX users, if this variable is set to t.
ESS[S]: C-c C-c (ess-eval-function-or-paragraph-and-step) is now skipping over comments as the other paragraph functions do. It (and similar functions) should no longer wrongly find ‘function()’ beginnings inside comments or strings.
ESS[SAS]: improved by better support for GNU Emacs

Changes/New Features in 5.13:

ESS[R]: On Windows, for R 2.12.0 and later, the Rterm executables (in subdirectories i386 / x64) now are found as well as for earlier R versions.
ESS[S+]: on Windows, both 32- and 64-bit versions of S+ (“S-PLUS”) are found now and made available on the menu.
ESS[R]: When prompting for a starting directory, the R version is (always?) correct now.
ESS[R]: on non-Windows platforms, the use-dialog-box variable is no longer temporarily changed (to nil for R-x.y.z version functions and to t for R itself), but rather the user customization is obeyed.
ESS[R]: more Roxygen improvements.
‘Rd-preview-help’ now generates preview buffers with navigation facilities the same as regular help buffers.
ESS: New functions and keys C-c [up] / [down] for evaluating the buffer “from beginning till here”.

Changes/New Features in 5.12:

ESS[SAS] Font-locking: update of PROCs keywords (up to SAS 9.22); error/warnings.
ESS[R]: Roxygen improvements: S4 classes; also optionally keep spaces when filling arguments
ESS[Rd]: support new keywords: section-name \subsection plus a dozen “new” keywords; should match R 2.12.x now.
ess-display-help-on-object (C-c C-v) now caches the list of topics, thus speeding up the improvement feature introduced in 5.9.

Changes/New Features in 5.11:

Filename completion within buffers now adds only trailing characters to complete the filename, rather than expanding to an absolute file path. This filename completion is bound to the TAB key.
M-n P in Sweave buffers now prompts for the command to run instead of using pdflatex unconditionally, offering completion from customizable collection ess-swv-pdflatex-commands, the first of which is taken as default and that defaults to texi2pdf.
M-RET is now also bound in S language (R and S+) buffers to ess-use-this-dir. It sends setwd(..) to the S process to set the working directory to the one of the source file.

Changes/New Features in 5.10:

M-RET in *S* buffers is now bound to ess-dirs. This function will set Emacs’s current directory to be the same as the *S* process. This is useful if you use setwd() within a *S* process.

Changes/New Features in 5.9:

Toolbar: The toolbar now has an icon for starting Splus.
Indentation: New documentation and code has been added to make it easier to change how ESS indents code. In particular, see ess-default-style, ess-own-style-list and the documentation subsection “Changing indentation styles”.
ess-display-help-on-object (C-c C-v) now offers completion candidates for help file aliases, in addition to object names.
Font locking: is now turned on even without window-system is nil, whenever ess-font-lock-mode is non-nil, i.e., by default.
ESS script editing: ess-eval-deactivate-mark default is now t, as suggested by Leo Alekseyev and subsequent “unanimous” ESS-help discussion.
ESS[R]: Editing support for “#!” (Rscript / littler) editing, thanks to Jeffrey Arnold.
ESS[R]: Now finds all R versions, both 64-bit and 32-bit, on some 64-bit Windows machines. Please report back to ess-core success or failure on your 64-bit Windows machine.
ESS Manual now more visually pleasing; https://ess.r-project.org/Manual/ess.html
ESS[R]: Roxygen on XEmacs no longer font locks for now (as it required missing features and hence broke ESS startup, there).
ESS[R]: Roxygen has a sub-menu on the [ESS] menu.
ESS[R]: Function ess-rutils-htmldocs in ess-rutils.el offers an alternative to help.start() for navigating R documentation, using the browse-url Emacs function.

Changes/New Features in 5.8:

ESS[R]: New ess-rutils.el with utilities for listing, loading, installing, and updating packages, as well as object manipulation (listing, viewing, and deleting). It also provides an alternative to RSiteSearch() that uses the browse-url function, so results can be viewed in an Emacs web browser.
ESS[R]: much more extensive Roxygen interface, via ess-roxy.el from Henning Redestig. Ess-roxy supports filling of roxygen fields, generation and updating roxygen templates, completion of roxygen tags, basic navigation (marking and moving between entries), folding using hs-minor-mode and preview of the Rd file.
Emacs Lisp files have got better names (partly, for now).

Changes/New Features in 5.7:

ESS[R]: loading a source file (C-c C-l) now works in Windows, similarly to other platforms; (further; it had accidentally been broken in ESS 5.6 on all platforms)

Changes/New Features in 5.6:

ESS[R]: help() calls have to differ from old default, with newer versions of R; currently via .help.ESS <- function(...) hack.

Changes/New Features in 5.4:

ESS[SAS]: The long overdue change from make-regexp to regexp-opt for font-locking is complete. The new regexp-opt is now the default since it is better than the old code in many ways (and especially more maintainable). However, there are certainly some special cases missed (bug reports and patches welcome!). Setting ess-sas-run-regexp-opt to nil will result in the old code being used.
ESS[BUGS] and ESS[JAGS]: typing = now results in <-.
ESS[R] function arguments “show” (ess-r-args-show) now uses the new (tooltip-show-at-point) contributed by Erik Iverson.
Toolbar icons now also work in (beta) Emacs 23.
ESS[S]: New function ess-change-directory for setting both emacs’ current directory and the directory of an *R* or *S* buffer.
ESS[S] when transient-mark-mode is true, the mark is now kept, rather than deactivated, thanks to a patch from David Reitter.

Changes/New Features in 5.3.11:

ESS[SAS]: work around bug in Emacs 22.2 & 22.3 which fails to set case-fold fontification automatically.
Rd mode: support new keyword ’Rdversion’
ESS[R]: now again works with Emacs 21.x

Changes/New Features in 5.3.10:

Fixed noweb-mode bug accidentally introduced into 5.3.9
In noweb-mode, e.g., Rnw-mode, electric “<” also inserts closing “@". Further, the code chunk boundaries are better kept up-to-date, such that code[R] <-> text[LaTeX] minor mode switching should happen more reliably.
In noweb-mode, fix a buglet in rare [Enter] or [Tab] behavior; further, by default disable the former ‘[[’ .. ‘]]’ code-protection-when-filling behavior which has been found to be buggy.

Changes/New Features in 5.3.9:

ESS[SAS]: evince PDF viewer now supported as well; search order: evince, Xpdf, Adobe/Acrobat Reader
ESS[R]: added support for Roxygen, potentially to be extended.
ESS[S] (and R): inferior (*R*) and transcript modes no longer fontify language keywords (such as for, in, etc).
iESS[Stata]: Customize the ess-sta-delimiter-friendly setting to t to convert embedded semi-colons to newlines for Stata processing.
Sweave fix for embedded blanks in PDF reader and PDF files
Several fixes for Major Mode Convention violations in ess-mode and noweb-mode.
ESS[JAGS]: M-x comment-region now available!
ESS[S] The ess-swv-* commands (and keybindings) are now in a submenu of the “Noweb” menu, when editing Sweave files.

Changes/New Features in 5.3.8:

ESS[JAGS]: more separation from ESS[BUGS] (as much as is currently planned); now C-c C-c on an empty .jmd creates a template as it should; symbolic links are created for CODA output so BOA is happy: from index.txt to .ind and chain#.txt to #.out
ESS[SAS]: buffer-local ess-sas-submit-command and ess-sas-submit-command-options now recognized by ess-sas-submit-region
ESS[S]: When trying to evaluate code in an S language buffer and there is no associated process, now start R automatically instead of signalling an error. Also, restart R if there is an associated process which is not running. However, do not start R just via the “electric” ( (ess-r-args-auto-show).
ESS[S]: For (one-line) functions withOUT ’{ .. }’ bodys, the end of function is now correctly found more often. This notably improves C-c C-c (ess-eval-function-or-paragraph-and-step).
ESS[JAGS]: cleanup/re-organization of Elisp code; symbolic links for CODA output are now only created by the new JAGS system command in version 1.0.3; specify whether this command is available via ess-jags-system; if not present, then no links are created so that the *shell* buffer does not become unresponsive during the batch run

Changes/New Features in 5.3.7:

ESS: ess-default-style now *is* customizable, i.e., changing its value in ~/.emacs now does have the desired effect.
ESS: ess-font-lock-mode is a new variable (default: t) which controls whether font-locking is enabled in ESS buffers.
ESS[R]: for XEmacs on Windows; another tweak to find R versions
ESS[SAS]: font-locking updated for ODS and SAS Bayesian Procedures; a more consistent handling of SAS options by ess-sas-submit-command-options which is buffer-local; portable snooze for MS Windows via customize-able ess-sleep-for (floats welcome); Xpdf now supported as a PDF viewer
ESS[Rnw]: now also works with “emacs -nw” and Emacs 22.
ESS[JAGS]: now requires JAGS 1.0 (see the new ESS for JAGS help section for more information): both need work; suggestions welcome
ESS[R]: [TAB] completion now uses the R-internal completion mechanism (for R >= 2.5.0).
ESS[R] ([S]): interpretation of “_” as assignment has been removed in ess-continued-statement-p for R and S.
several internal code cleanups.
ESS[R]: An experimental version of a new command Rgui on MS Windows to send lines directly from emacs to Rgui is available in file lisp/essd-rgui.el. Preliminary documentation is in file doc/rgui-doc.txt.

Changes/New Features in 5.3.6:

ESS: for XEmacs, using “gnuclient” (without a “-q”) works for things like fix() after M-x gnuserv-start has been done.
ESS[R]: M-x R-newest should now work in more situations on MS Windows, e.g., when R has been installed in a non-default "ProgramFiles" directory tree. In these cases, there’s no need to specify the name (and full path) of the R program anymore.
ESS[R]: For XEmacs, startup (with new tooltip code) works again.

Changes/New Features in 5.3.5:

ESS[R] a new defun is available, M-x R-newest, which will start the newest version of R that it can find on your system.
ESS[R] add Sven Hartenstein’s “R function arguments tips” functionality, via new file ../lisp/essd-r-args.el. Note that this includes an “electric "("” behavior inside R-mode which is active by default and can be customized via ess-r-args-electric-paren; i.e., use (setq ess-r-args-electric-paren nil) to turn it off. Further, ess-r-args-show-as allows to switch to the “tooltip” mode.
ESS: functions ess-get-pdf-viewer and *-ps-viewer; built on new customizable variables ess-pdf-viewer-pref and ess-ps-viewer-pref; currently used in ess-swv-PDF and *-PS.
ESS[R] Improved ess-swv-PDF to run pdf viewer only if pdflatex was ok
ESS[R] Improved ess-swv-weave to start R automatically if none is running.
ESS: Do no longer ask which ESS process to use if there is only one.

Changes/New Features in 5.3.4:

ESS[R] now better work with options(error=recover); and the new default of CHM help files on windows.
ESS[R] some more cleanup in the “sweave” functions
miscellaneous fixes

Changes/New Features in 5.3.3:

ESS[S] fix buglet (5.3.2 only) which left command prompt in “execute buffer” and hence help files.
new customizable variable ess-display-buffer-reuse-frames set to true (which changes default behavior) such that execution or help *frames* are reused.

Changes/New Features in 5.3.2:

Classic BUGS now supported by (require 'essd-bugs) with ESS[BUGS] and JAGS by (require 'essd-jags) with ESS[JAGS]. But, only one of them can be used at a time since they don’t play nice together. Also, C-c C-c is now bound to the function ess-bugs-next-action (F12 has been retired). And finally, note that essl-bug.el is deprecated and the replacement is essl-bugs.el.
ESS[R] Improved some of the “Sweave-make” functions (yet scarcely documented) in ess-swv.el.
ESS[S] No longer mess with .Last.value (nor in other “languages”).

Changes/New Features in 5.3.1:

See the docs for 2 ways to install ESS for XEmacs
1. by uncommenting the XEmacs part of Section 1 of Makeconf and performing make install
2. by unpacking either ess-5.3.1.tgz or ess-5.3.1.zip into PREFIX/lib/xemacs/site-packages on unix or PREFIX\XEmacs\site-packages on windows
ESS[R]: fixed bugs so that Rterm.exe can be found by XEmacs
ESS[S]: ess-toggle-S-assign-key is slightly changed; in particular, the default ess-assign-key is now C-x =.
ESS[R]: M-x R-site-search is a new (slightly experimental) utility similar to R’s RSiteSearch(..) but with the advantage of using Emacs’ preferred browser, see browse-url-browser-function

Changes/New Features in 5.3.0:

ESS[BUGS]: sanely re-format statistical output, .bog, from scientific notation to numbers rounded with 4 decimal places with M-x ess-bugs-sci-round-to-4-dp.
The keys for navigating among section headings in help buffers worked, but only for one language per session; they should now work for multiple languages. (They were also broken on Windows machines.)
ESS[S] long standing buglets in the internal logic for loading Lisp code on Windows. Particularly fixed behavior in help mode with S-plus GUI.
New variable, ess-use-inferior-program-name-in-buffer-name, which enables using the executable name instead of the dialect name for R. Feature request.
ESS[S] ess-execute-screen-options now also works correctly when there is more than one window *side-by-side* in the same frame and runs in the correct buffer also when there is more than one S buffer.
iESS[S] new functions ess-eval-paragraph-and-step and ess-eval-function-or-paragraph-and-step are bound to keys C-c C-p and C-c C-c respectively and to the menu in ESS-mode; also bound in the help mode (for evaluating examples).
ESS[S] new function ess-toggle-S-assign-key allows to assign the “ <- ” insertion to an arbitrary key.

Changes/New Features in 5.2.12:

ESS[SAS]: M-; fixed, but the XEmacs function comment-dwim may be broken, if so, use M-x comment-region and M-x uncomment-region instead; only valid PROCs are fontified which is very helpful finding syntax errors (currently supported: BASE, ETS, FSP, GRAPH, IML, INSIGHT and STAT); the “feature” where F-keys take you to an empty buffer when the requested destination is a file that does not exist has been fixed, now the request results in a no-op. Further, sas-mode now also works in simple terminals.
Rterm/Cygwin combination works under Microsoft Windows.
ESS[R]: internal calls use baseenv() instead of NULL and define ’baseenv’ where needed.
New experimental support for installing ESS. See the file lisp/ess-install.el.

Changes/New Features in 5.2.11:

ESS Info entry and dir handled more effectively for GNU Emacs users
ESS[SAS]: temporary files created for batch submission of a region are now named based on the current file; see ess-sas-file-root for details; all lag and dif functions now fontified correctly
iESS[SAS]: fixed a few nagging bugs, however, still does not appear to work at this time; please let us know if you have any ideas.
ESS[S]: Support for running other versions of Splus has been added for unix. Two new variables, ess-s-versions and ess-s-versions-list, are used to tell ESS what other versions of Splus you would like to run.

Changes/New Features in 5.2.10:

ESS[R]: ess-r-versions can no longer be customized (since the customization was not taking effect unless customizations were loaded before ESS). Its value has been changed so that it will also find R executables beginning “R-devel” and “R-patched”. If you wish to change this variable, it must be set in your .emacs before ESS is loaded.
Installation with GNU Make enhanced: unix and unix-like operating systems will now be able to install ESS for all users in either a GNU Emacs site-lisp or an XEmacs package configuration by editing lisp/ess-site.el and Makeconf accordingly, then issuing make install
ESS[S]: Filename completion (inside strings) now also works in XEmacs for R and S-plus.

Changes/New Features in 5.2.9:

ESS[R] for Windows: the \ directory character bug with respect to ess-load-file has been eradicated.
iESS[SAS]: C-c C-r and C-c C-b once again work as intended and documented.
ESS[S]: M-x ess-fix-EQ-assign is a bit more aggressive.
ESS[S]: Imenu now also shows setAs(), etc.
ESS[R]: R function pattern enhanced with underlying code such that M-C-a (ess-beginning-of-function) etc now work for many more cases, including S4 method definitions.
iESS[R]: myOwnhelp(1) no longer wrongly triggers help(1).
ESS[R]: Improved detection of bogus help buffers: valid help buffers containing with the string “no documentation”(e.g. contour) were being treated as bogus.
ESS[R]: In R help buffers, if options("help.try.all.packages" = TRUE) then ?rlm will list which packages rlm is defined in. This help buffer is not bogus, but instead is now relabelled “*help[R](rlm in packages)*”.
ESS[STA]: add “//” as comment starting character to syntax-table.

Changes/New Features in 5.2.8:

iESS: [Tab] completes file names “inside string” as in earlier (<= 5.2.3) ESS versions.

Changes/New Features in 5.2.7:

If you use Custom to change the variable ess-toolbar-items, the new toolbar is used in all subsequent ESS buffers.
ESS[SAS]: new feature: if ess-sas-log-max >0 and your .log grows to more than ess-sas-log-max bytes, just the first ess-sas-log-max bytes are refreshed; this is helpful when your .sas program generates lots of error messages and gets too big for emacs to display
ESS[R/S]: M-; in R/S editing modes will now indent with either one or two hashes depending on context.
ESS[R]: David Whiting’s Sweave extensions (to ’noweb’) are now available (from ess-swv.el loaded by default).

Changes/New Features in 5.2.6:

Removed non-ASCII characters in a few files.
ESS[R]: now works better when UTF-8 locale is active; in particular, you get correct directional quotes in R’s startup message for R-devel (unstable development version of R 2.1.0) when using environment variables LANGUAGE=en@quot LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
ESS[SAS]: toggling of .log mode improved (F10); toggling of .lst mode now also available (C-F10); killing all buffers associated with .sas program no longer bound to C-F10 since its a bit overzealous.
S-Plus 7 for Windows is now recognized.
ESS[S] (incl. R): in auto-fill mode, strings are not wrapped anymore.
ESS[S] (incl. R): font-lock now correctly differs between R and S, e.g., for "_"; both now fontify warning(.) and S does terminate() additionally.
Support for ‘bell’ aka ‘beep’ aka ‘ding’ aka ‘alarm’ in all inferior modes: When \a is output “to the the console” at the beginning of a line, the bell is rung.

Changes/New Features in 5.2.5:

ESS[R]: C-c C-q or ‘Quit S’ from the menu now should work (again and less klunkily) and do not append ‘-exited’ to the buffer name. Further, the behavior of (ess-cleanup), called from ess-quit, now depends on the new customizable variable ess-S-quit-kill-buffers-p which defaults to nil. Consequently, the question “Delete all buffers associated with ..?” will not be asked anymore by default.
ESS[SAS] – ess-ebcdic-to-ascii-search-and-replace will now work with the recode application as well which is available on many platforms
ESS[S] (incl. R): Name completion for slots of S4 objects now works!

Changes/New Features in 5.2.4:

The documentation now includes an overview of how to use the emacs TAGS facility for S functions. (The distribution also used to contain a directory etc/other/Tags where a ~1990 version of etags.c was distributed; this is no longer relevant and so has been deleted.)
ESS[SAS] – When you are working with EBCDIC files on an ASCII platform, .log NOTEs may display as gibberish since the EBCDIC characters are not converted to ASCII prior to their display. So, the function ess-ebcdic-to-ascii-search-and-replace is provided for convenience and is bound to C-F11. This function requires the dd command (only available on unix or unix-like platforms).
ESS: Completion of object names is now always done dynamically rather than allowing the option of using a pre-computed database (by ess-create-object-name-db) since modern computers seem fast enough for dynamic completion. (We expect few users, if any, have been using the pre-computed database method.)
ESS: object completion in iESS buffers running on Windows was very slow (for GNU Emacs, but not XEmacs) and has now been fixed. Further, it was more or less broken for all versions of S-plus 6.x, and has been fixed to work everywhere but with the Windows’ GUI of S-plus. The list of objects now shows unique names also when an object appears more than once in the search path.
ESS[R]: Completion of object names now also includes those starting with “.”.

Changes/New Features in 5.2.3:

ESS: When new inferior ESS processes are created, by default they will replace the current buffer (this restores behavior from pre 5.2.0). If you wish new ESS processes to start in another window of the current frame, set inferior-ess-same-window to nil.
New variables inferior-Splus-args and inferior-R-args provide a way to pass command line arguments to starting S and R processes.

Changes/New Features in 5.2.2:

bug-fixes for 5.2.1 (require ’executable), html docs, etc.
ess-lisp-directory/../doc/info added to Info-directory-list if ess-info not found by info
ESS[R]: If you have other versions of R on your exec-path, such as "R-1.8.1" with Unix or "rw1081" with Windows, ESS will find them and create appropriate functions, such as M-x R-1.8.1 or M-x rw1081, for calling them. By default only Unix programs beginning "R-1" and "R-2" and Windows programs parallel to the version of R in your exec-path will be found, but see ess-r-versions and ess-rterm-versions for ways to find other versions of R.
ESS[R]: Other versions of R, such as "R-1.8.1" on Unix and "rw1081" on Windows, are added to the "ESS / Start Process / Other" menu.
ESS[S]: If you have other versions of S-Plus on your Windows computer, such as S-Plus 6.1 or S-Plus 4.5, ESS will find them and create appropriate functions, such as M-x splus61, for calling the console version (Sqpe) inside an emacs buffer. By default only programs installed in the default location will be found, but see ess-SHOME-versions for ways to find other versions of S-Plus.
ESS[S]: Other versions of Sqpe on Windows, such as "splus61", are added to the "ESS / Start Process / Other" menu.
ESS[R]: (bug fix) ess-quit (bound to C-c C-q) should now quit the inferior R process, when issued from either the inferior buffer, or from a .R buffer.

Changes/New Features in 5.2.1:

ESS[S] (R and S-plus): now have toolbar support with icons to evaluate code in the inferior process or to switch there. This code is experimental and likely to change as XEmacs/Emacs issues get resolved. The toolbar should be enabled if your Emacs displays images, but can be disabled with the variable ess-use-toolbar. Thanks to David Smith from Insightful for the S-plus logo.
ESS[SAS]: ess-sas-graph-view (F12) enhanced; you can specify external file viewers for each graphics file type via the alist ess-sas-graph-view-viewer-alist; also .jpg/.gif are now handled by image-mode on XEmacs, if available, otherwise by graphics primitives as before

Changes/New Features in 5.2.0:

ESS[BUGS]: new info documentation! now supports interactive processing thanks to Aki Vehtari; new architecture-independent unix support as well as support for BUGS v. 0.5
ESS[SAS]: convert .log to .sas with ess-sas-transcript; info documentation improved; Local Variable bug fixes; SAS/IML statements/functions now highlighted; files edited remotely by ange-ftp/EFS/tramp are recognized and pressing SUBMIT opens a buffer on the remote host via the local variable ess-sas-shell-buffer-remote-init which defaults to "ssh"; changed the definition of the variable ess-sas-edit-keys-toggle to boolean rather than 0/1; added the function ess-electric-run-semicolon which automatically reverse indents lines containing only "run;"; C-F1 creates MS RTF portrait from the current buffer; C-F2 creates MS RTF landscape from the current buffer; C-F9 opens a SAS DATASET with PROC INSIGHT rather than PROC FSVIEW; "inferior" aliases for SAS batch: C-c C-r for submit region, C-c C-b for submit buffer, C-c C-x for goto .log; C-c C-y for goto .lst
ESS[S]: Pressing underscore ("_") once inserts " <- " (as before); pressing underscore twice inserts a literal underscore. To stop this smart behaviour, add "(ess-toggle-underscore nil)" to your .emacs after ess-site has been loaded; ess-dump-filename-template-proto (new name!) now can be customized successfully (for S language dialects); Support for Imenu has been improved; set ess-imenu-use-S to non-nil to get an "Imenu-S" item on your menubar; ess-help: Now using nice underlines (instead of ‘nuke-* ^H_’)
ESS[R]: After (require ’essa-r), M-x ess-r-var allows to load numbers from any Emacs buffer into an existing *R* process; M-x ess-rdired gives a “directory editor” of R objects; fixed ess-retr-lastvalue-command, i.e. .Last.value bug (thanks to David Brahm)
ESS: Support for creating new window frames has been added to ESS. Inferior ESS processes can be created in dedicated frames by setting inferior-ess-own-frame to t. ESS help buffers can also open in new frames; see the documentation for ess-help-own-frame for details. (Thanks to Kevin Rodgers for contributing code.)

Changes/New Features in 5.1.24:

The version number is now correct even inside ESS/Emacs

Changes/New Features in 5.1.23:

Minor more Makefile clean up.

Changes/New Features in 5.1.22:

Besides info documentation, PDF and HTML documentation are also provided (instead of built using "make") and available on the web as well; see ESS web page and StatLib
Now that info documentation is available, the README.* files are no longer supported. However, they are still distributed for what it’s worth.
ESS is now an XEmacs package! See XEmacs Installation HOWTO for details (specifically, items 10-15).
ESS[SAS]: more user-friendly enhancements for remote SAS batch jobs with Kermit file transfers (LOG and OUTPUT function key features now supported). Multiple shells now supported so you can run SAS on different computers from different buffers by setting the buffer-local variable ess-sas-shell-buffer to unique buffer names.
Major re-vamping of Makefile/Makeconf.

Changes/New Features in 5.1.21:

ESS[SAS]: info documentation now available!, see ESS->Help for SAS; F12 opens GSASFILE nearest point for viewing either within emacs, when available, or via an external viewer; more syntax highlighting keywords; more enhancements for remote SAS batch jobs with Kermit; new framework for remote SAS interactive jobs, see ess-remote
ESS[S]: info documentation now available!, see ESS->Help for the S family
Makefile: tag now independent of rel; info files made by doc/Makefile and installed in new info sub-directory

Changes/New Features in 5.1.20:

New ‘options()$STERM’ in the S dialects (S, S-Plus, R). The S program can determine the environment in which it is currently running. ESS sets the option to ‘iESS’ or ‘ddeESS’ when it starts an S language process. We recommend other specific values for S language processes that ESS does not start.
New ‘ess-mouse-me’ function, assigned to S-mouse-3 by default. User may click on a word or region and then choose from the menu to display the item, or a summary, or a plot, etc. This feature is still under development.
GNU Emacs 21.1 is now supported (fixed for S dialects, SAS & BUGS), (some from Stephen Eglen).
XEmacs 21.x is now supported (fixed w32-using-nt bug)
XEmacs on Win (NT) is better supported.
Workaround for bug in Sqpe+6 (S-PLUS 6 for Win).
should now work even when imenu is not available (for old XEmacsen).
ESS[SAS]: XEmacs-Imenu fix; C-TAB is globalized along with your function-key definitions, if specified; you can specify your SAS library definitions outside of autoexec.sas for ess-sas-data-view with SAS code placed in the variable ess-sas-data-view-libname, also the dataset name is defaulted to the nearest permanent dataset to point; Speedbar support now works for permanent datasets, please ignore first./last.; new font-locking is now the default with more improvements for font-locking PROCs, macro statements, * ; and %* ; comments; you can toggle sas-log-mode with F10 which will font-lock your .log (if it isn’t too big); submit remote .sas files accessed with ange-ftp, EFS or Tramp (Kermit is experimental) by setting ess-sas-submit-method to ’sh; ess-sas-submit-command and ess-sas-submit-command-options are buffer-local so you can have local file variable sections at the end of your .sas files to request different executables or specify special options and the local file variables are re-read at submit instead of only at file open so that if you make a change it is picked up immediately;
ESS[BUGS]: font-lock with ‘in’ fixed.
for STATA: font-lock bug fixed.
for Rd mode: C-c C-v and ‘switch-process’ in menu. further, C-c C-f prefix (Rd-font) for inserting or surrounding a word by things such as \code{.}, \code{\link{.}}, \emph{.} etc.
new functions (ess-directory-function) and (ess-narrow-to-defun) ess-directory <-> default-directory logic (Jeff Mincy).
Re-organized Makefile and fixed a few bugs.

Changes/New Features in 5.1.19:

S+6 now supported (Tony Rossini (Unix) and Rich Heiberger (Windows))
New BUGS support through ESS[BUGS] mode (Rodney Sparapani) Templates assist you in writing .bug and .cmd code (.cmd and .log are replaced by .bmd and .bog to avoid emacs extension collisions). Substitution" parameters facilitate "automagic" generation of data...in" and "init...in" filenames, "const N=" from your data file and "monitor()/stats()" commands. Activated by pressing F12.
Fixes for ‘ess-smart-underscore’ SAS breakage (Rich Heiberger)
You can change between PC and Unix, local and global SAS function-key definitions interactively (Rich Heiberger)
C-Submit a highlighted region to SAS batch (Rodney Sparapani)
New and improved SAS syntax highlighting (Rodney Sparapani) To get the new functionality, set ess-sas-run-make-regexp to nil. Also available in .log files via F10.
Open a permanent SAS dataset for viewing via F9 (Rodney Sparapani) You must have the library defined in autoexec.sas for it to work.
User-friendly defaults for ‘sas-program’, ‘ess-sas-batch-pre-command’ and ‘ess-sas-batch-post-command’ as well Customize support for these and other ESS[SAS] variables (Rodney Sparapani)
‘ess-sas-suffix-2’ now defaults to .dat via F11 (Rodney Sparapani)
Emacs/XEmacs, Unix/Windows issues collectively handled in ess-emcs.el
defadvice solves problem of missing *ESS* (thanks to Jeff Mincy)
Improved manual a bit by including things that were only in ‘README’.

Changes/New Features in 5.1.18:

New ‘ess-smart-underscore’ function, now assigned to "_" by default. Inserts ‘ess-S-assign’ (customizable " <- "), unless inside string and comments where plain "_" is used instead. (MM)
Fixes for longstanding interactive SAS breakage (RMH)

Changes/New Features in 5.1.17:

Documentation for Windows Installation (Rich Heiberger)
removal of ess-vars, finalization of customize support (in the sense that there is no more use of ess-vars, but that we need to fix ess-cust) (AJ Rossini)
Many small (and large) fixes/contributions (MMaechler)
addition of the "S-equal" variable and provide M-x ess-add-MM-keys a way to remap "_" to ‘ess-S-assign’, typically " <- ", but customizable. (MMaechler)

Changes/New Features in 5.1.16:

BUG FIXES
Better SAS support

Changes/New Features in 5.1.15:

BUG FIXES

Changes/New Features in 5.1.14:

Yet more fixes to SAS mode, (Rich Heiberger and Rodney Sparapani)
Customize support (for most Emacsen which support it) (AJRossini)
ARC and ViSta support out of the box, and fixes for XLispStat (AJRossini)

Changes/New Features in 5.1.13:

Version numbering finally all depending on the ./VERSION file, thanks to Martin Maechler.
Yet more fixes to SAS mode, thanks to Rich Heiberger.

Changes/New Features in 5.1.12:

Splus 5.1 stabilized, thanks to Martin Maechler, Bill Venables, Chuck Taylor, and others.
More fixes to SAS mode, thanks to Rodney Sparapani and Rich Heiberger.

Changes/New Features in 5.1.11:

More fixes to Stata mode, thanks to Brendan Halpin.
fixed bugs in ESS-elsewhere, thanks to many testers
README.SPLUS4WIN has DETAILED instructions for S-PLUS 2000, thanks to David Brahm.
Fixes to SAS mode, thanks to Rodney Sparapani

Changes/New Features in 5.1.10:

More fixes to Stata mode
primitive generic version of ESS-elsewhere
Small fixes to SAS/Stata.

Changes/New Features in 5.1.9:

Stata mode works
Literate Data Analysis using Noweb works

Changes/New Features in 5.1.8:

Bug fixes
R documentation mode defaults changed

Changes/New Features in 5.1.2:

able to use inferior iESS mode to communicate directly with a running S-Plus 4.x process using the Microsoft DDE protocol. We use the familiar (from Unix ESS) C-c C-n and related key sequences to send lines from the S-mode file to the inferior S process. We continue to edit S input files in ESS[S] mode and transcripts of previous S sessions in ESS Transcript mode. All three modes know the S language, syntax, and indentation patterns and provide the syntactic highlighting that eases the programming tasks.