comments on organization and formatting

[plantarum]

I think this is a great presentation of a number of useful customizations for ESS. I'm a long time user, and there are things in here that I rely on, and also things in here that I didn't even know about!

I found the text easy to read, no problems with the language. I do wonder if there could be some higher level structure. As is, it reads like a long list of things users can tweak. Is it possible to order the suggestions in a logical way, or group them into categories? I'm not sure if there is, and maybe this is fine for a short presentation. It does provide a nice survey of different ideas.

I do not like the slides. I think the text works well as a written tutorial. It does not work well formatting this content as slides. Filling slides with long paragraphs of text creates an awkward document. Too much for the audience to take in during a presentation, but too chopped up to allow for easy reading as a document.

I suggest not exporting this as slides, but rather exporting as a regular pdf document. It's already quite good for that! If you want slides (and I'm not sure you need them), those long paragraphs should be reduced to key points/bullets.

Thanks for your great work, this is a really helpful document!

[frederic-santos]

Hi,

Many thanks for your suggestions, this is exactly what I expected when I proposed a peer-review system :)
You're probably right about the slides. I'll convert them as a standard pdf/tex document. I'll also think about a better structure.

Just by curiosity, what were the settings/packages you were not aware of? (Maybe I should give some more details about them, if they are not very "standard" tools.)

[plantarum]

Hi Frederic, To be clear, I first read your org source file, and I think it is already quite good as a stand-alone document. It was just breaking that information into slides that threw me a little. The big thing I haven't used before was rdired. It sounds very useful. I've been using ESS since 2004, and only periodically follow new developments. I guess rdired was available then, but I didn't notice it at the time. Maybe it's already standard for most ESS users. I also don't use flycheck or flymake, although I know they exist. Similarly, I haven't explored company yet. company-quick-help sounds handy! Best, Tyler Frédéric Santos writes:

…

Hi, Many thanks for your suggestions, this is exactly what I expected when I proposed a peer-review system :) You're probably right about the slides. I'll convert them as a standard pdf/tex document. I'll also think about a better structure. Just by curiosity, what were the settings/packages you were not aware of? (Maybe I should give some more details about them, if they are not very "standard" tools.)

-- Tyler Smith plantarum.ca

[aezarebski]

Hi Frederic,

This is very impressive!

From a preliminary read-through I think @plantarum's comments are spot on. The
document is well very clear with a perfect balance of writing, code and images.
The slides are a work of beamer art, but the plain orgmode file is sufficient
and is probably nicer to use as a reference. I can imagine a short presentation
demonstrating how to "build-your-own-IDE with ESS" being engaging. Even if you
just quickly go over these features and then leave the interested audience
member to recreate it based off of the document you have written.

I struggled a bit getting lintr working so I've created an issue with a comment
about lintr and the =~/.R/lintr_cache= directory in case people haven't used it
before. Basic company and ess-rdired seemed to work out of the box which is
impressive. The window management stuff looks cool but I wasn't sure how to use
it.

I suspect I'll revisit this repo many times in the future :)

Cheers,
Alex

[eddelbuettel]

(Just piping back in from the side: I guess we don't have to limit slides to a few pages. Maybe a longer slide is then just your 'reference' and in the (much shorter) intro presentation you highlight just a few?

In a way we all have this problem of figuring out how to condense what. I also not sure how to best intro 'basic editing' with Emacs so I reference the C-h t tutorial, among other things...