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Shifting from Rstudio to ESS took some time with me because of the steep learning curve of a versatile Emacs editor, but is was a worthwhile experience. What I am still missing in ESS is that outline or overview of the R script file based on comments (called sections in Rstudio) by pressing Ctrl+Shift+R to give # some comments or title here (see the screenshot).

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After having a lot of sections and the file size becomes very large, it becomes increasingly difficult to navigate throughout a giant multi-section file. In Rstudio I press that orange button # to pop up a small window of all sections or # comments and by clicking any one of them will put me on that heading in the file.

Similar thing I found in AUCTeX is the C-c = which will show an outline clickable table to navigate that .tex file.

How to obtain this handy overview in ESS?

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I like orgstruct-mode. In the following file you can collapse headings with Tab or S-Tab, much like in org-mode. Note that the eval part below collapsed the file to out-most level when opening the file.

##* sec1
x <- rnorm(10)
##** sec11
y <- x<0
##* sec 2
z <- x + y

## Local Variables:
## outline-regexp: "##*\\*+\\|\\`"
## orgstruct-heading-prefix-regexp: "##*\\*+\\|\\`"
## eval: (progn (orgstruct-mode) (org-global-cycle 3))
## End:
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  • Great! even more flexible! but do you know how to activate/deactivate application of orstruct code while I am inside the buffer? to play with the code I have to kill/and open the same buffer and answer y or no for application of the safe code.
    – doctorate
    Commented Feb 9, 2015 at 7:58
  • The first part of regexp till \\| will detect the ## and multiples of following asterisks, but I wonder what is the benefit of the last part |\\` in regexp?
    – doctorate
    Commented Feb 9, 2015 at 8:58
  • do revert-file will reload file-local variables. There's a info page about if you search (I haven't got time atm). The \` matches the beginning of the buffer/string depending on context.
    – rasmus
    Commented Feb 9, 2015 at 9:06
  • is there any way to add a directive like in org-mode to determine level of folding for this buffer, #+STARTUP: overview kind of thing?
    – doctorate
    Commented Mar 18, 2016 at 12:30
  • doctorate, you could try different arguments ("levels") in the org-global-cycle call.
    – rasmus
    Commented Apr 8, 2016 at 14:25

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