Re: st: GNU Emacs, ESS and Stata

[Phil Schumm <pschumm@uchicago.edu>]

On Apr 24, 2008, at 5:25 AM, Christopher Intemann wrote:
> I'd be happy to learn about an alternative editor for stata which  
> is capable of interactive mode, in particular for Mac OS X.

One of the best text editors for writing Stata (and other) code on OS  
X is TextMate (http://macromates.com/).  There are a million reasons  
for this; for example, TextMate can handle Stata's compound quotes  
(`" and "') and match the macro expansion characters ` and '.  I can  
send you a Stata bundle if you'd like.  One user has made a lot of  
progress in developing an R bundle that permits interactive use of R  
within a TextMate window.  His work could be used as a template for  
developing similar functionality for other applications, though I  
don't believe you'd get very far with Stata -- at least not with  
console Stata on OS X.  I could be wrong.

Personally, I've found that a good text editor running alongside GUI  
Stata works pretty well.  In fact, you could even bind the return key  
(temporarily or with a modifier) to send the current line to Stata  
for processing, which would simulate an interactive session pretty  
well.  I rather like the smooth lines that SMCL generates and the  
color scheme I use for the Results window, and you would of course  
lose these if you were running inside an editor buffer.


-- Phil

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