Start a named ESS R process from a function

Question

I'm trying to create a small interactive elisp function in order to quickly display a layout suitable for answering a Stackoverflow question about R. The idea is to open a temporary R file, and launch an R session associated to it in another frame.

So far I wrote this very simple thing :

(defun jb-so ()
  "Start R for StackOverflow layout"
  (interactive)
  (find-file "/tmp/so.R")
  (new-frame)
  (R))

It's almost ok except for two details :

• There's a prompt to confirm that I want to launch the R session in /tmp. Is there a way to accept it automatically ?
• The session is called *R* by default, but I'd like to give it a specific name, such as *RSo* in order to avoid conflicts with other running or future sessions. Is there a way to do it directly from the function ?

Thanks in advance !

Answer 1

There are plenty of options that ess respects on startup. So emacs dynamic scope really helps here:

(defun jb-so ()
  "Start R for StackOverflow layout"
  (interactive)
  (find-file "/tmp/so.R")
  (let ((ess-ask-for-ess-directory nil)
        (inferior-ess-same-window nil)
        (ess-gen-proc-buffer-name-function (lambda (nm) "*RSO*")))
    (R)
    (pop-to-buffer "so.R")))

Note that this will work only in the recent versions of ESS that provide the facility to set custom names for process buffers (see ess-gen-proc-buffer-name-function). You can also rename inferior buffers with M-x rename-buffer.