Using ESS in console Emacs

Question

When I start Emacs 24.4.1 for Windows with the -nw option, I am unable to start R via Meta+R. Emacs becomes unrensponsive and I have to kill the process.

The problem seems connected with the call in (R):

(inferior-ess r-start-args cust-alist gdbp)

By debugging I see r-start-args is set to "--no-readline", but I am not able to debug inferior-ess. In fact Edebug gives: Debugger entered: nil, without stepping through code.

Answer 1

Source of the problem

So the problem is in the ESS variable ess-microsoft-p. Defined as:

(defvar ess-microsoft-p (or (equal window-system 'w32)
                            (equal window-system 'win32)
                            (equal window-system 'mswindows))
  "Value is t if the OS is one of Microsoft's, nil otherwise.")

When you run Emacs from a Windows console, window-system is nil (because a character terminal is not at all a window system), therefore such is ess-microsoft-p. Eventually the predicate says that you are not running on a Microsoft OS!

The unpleasant now follows, in fact, as for Meta-R, we have:

(defun R (&optional start-args)
  "Call 'R', the 'GNU S' system from the R Foundation. .....
If you have certain command line arguments that should always be passed
to R, put them in the variable `inferior-R-args'."
...
  (let* ((r-always-arg
          (if (or ess-microsoft-p (eq system-type 'cygwin))
              "--ess "
            ;; else: "unix alike"
            (if (not ess-R-readline) "--no-readline ")))
         (r-start-args
          (concat r-always-arg
                  inferior-R-args " " ; add space just in case
...
  (inferior-ess r-start-args cust-alist gdbp)
...

As you can see if ess-microsoft-p is false and the system-type is not Cygwin, the function (R) assumes we are running Linux, therefore sets r-always-arg to --no-readline instead of -ess. This variable is appended to r-always-arg and passed to the command line invoking R thorough (inferior-ess).

--no-readline is a Unix only argument to invoke R, turning off command-line editing via readline. R will not start with this switch in Windows and Emacs will hang, infinitely waiting for R.

It should be noted that if you run a native Windows Emacs in a Cygwin console you incur in the same problem, since (eq system-type 'cygwin) is true when Emacs is compiled for Cygwin, not when running in Cygwin.

Solution

To me the current definition of ess-microsoft-p seems buggy.
Anyway you can fix it, adding in your init file, after starting ESS. i.e. (require 'ess-site):

(setq ess-microsoft-p t)

UPDATE

Now ess-microsoft-p is:

(defvar ess-microsoft-p (or (eq system-type 'ms-dos)
                (eq system-type 'windows-nt))
  "Value is t if the OS is one of Microsoft's, nil otherwise.")

system-type is independent from the windowing system, therefore ess-microsoft-p correctly reports t in Windows console too.