Convenient Emacs Setup for Social Scientists Available, Thanks to RTC Team Member
From the post:
QSS consultant Ista Zahn has made work with Emacs a lot easier for social scientists with a package that is now available for users.
Ista Zahn, a member of the Institute’s Research Technology Consulting (RTC) team, became an Emacs user about 10 years ago, because it offered a convenient environment for literate programming and reproducible data analysis. “I quickly discovered,” he says, “as all Emacs users do, that Emacs is a strange creature.” Through nearly 40 years of continuous development, Emacs has accumulated a great many added features, which a user must comb through in order to choose which they need for their own work. Zahn explains how he came about the Emacs setup that is now available:
In the summer of 2014 Gary King asked for an Emacs configuration with a specific set of features, and I realized that my personal Emacs configuration already provided a lot of the features he was looking for. Since that time we’ve worked together to turn my personal Emacs configuration into something that can be useful to other Emacs users. The result is a well-documented Emacs initialization that focuses on configuring Emacs tools commonly used by social scientists, including LaTeX, git, and R.
Ista Zahn’s Emacs package for social scientists is available for download at https://github.com/izahn/dotemacs.
I stumbled over the word “convenient” in the title and not without cause.
Ista concedes as much when he says:
What the world needs now…
As of August 5th 2014 there are 2,960 github repositories named or mentioning ‘.emacs.d’, and another 627 named or mentioning “dotemacs”. Some of these are just personal emacs configurations, but many take pains to provide documentation and instruction for adopting them as your very own emacs configuration. And that’s not to mention the starter-kits, preludes and oh my emacs of the world! With all these options, does the world really need yet another emacs configuration?
No, the world does not need another emacs starter kit. Indeed the guy who started the original emacs starter-kit has concluded that the whole idea is unworkable, and that if you want to use emacs you’re better off configuring it yourself. I agree, and it’s not that hard, even if you don’t know emacs-lisp at all. You can copy code fragments from others’ configuration on github, from the emacs wiki, or from stackoverflow and build up your very own emacs configuration. And eventually it will be so perfect you will think “gee I could save people the trouble of configuring emacs, if they would just clone my configuration”. So you will put it on github, like everyone else (including me). Sigh.
On the other hand it may be that this emacs configuration is what you want after all. It turns on many nice features of emacs, and adds many more. Anyway it does not hurt to give it a try.
As he says, it won’t hurt to give it a try (but be sure to not step on your current Emacs installation/configuration).
How would you customize Emacs for authoring topic maps? What external programs would you call?
I first saw this in a tweet by Christophe Lalanne.