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Comment by clircle | Hacker News Reader

I'm learning for the first time that TeXmacs can interface with R for reproducible research and computational notebook type writing. I might give this a shot! I like writing Rmarkdown, but I sure hate writing prose in fixed width fonts, and I miss a lot of WYSIWYG features when I'm in Rstudio/Emacs.

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I have tried it now on Xubuntu 20.10 and there is a bug. I have asked here if anyone knows how to fix it: http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/does-the-r-plugin-work/434

Please see http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/does-the-r-plugin-work/434/2 (you maybe have figured it out on your own). I tried the solution with R_LIBS_USER=~/.local/lib/R, and despite still an error being present it is possible to enter commands and see the output. Plots are displayed in own windows, but it may be that with simple programming they may be embedded in the document too.

Edit: in the same thread one can read how to embed plots generated with R in the TeXmacs document. So my impression is that there is sufficient functionality for working.

TeXmacs has interfaces for many systems (https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1382216780702175232) including R. Seems that currently R does not run, however I think a medium R user can understand and fix the problem. The interface code for R is written in R.

Even Julia, nice !

https://discourse.julialang.org/t/texmacs-plugin-for-julia/5...

Julia is a lot of fun.

http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/julia-programming-language/115/27

Please give org-mode and org-babel a try also. There is much more utility with org and a much larger user-base. Org is more of a standard than TeXmacs, which I haven’t heard of until today. You can do all of what TeXmacs is doing without using their interface, which looks difficult to modify.

TeXmacs is as extensible as Emacs, being based on the same principles: having a full-fledged scheme interpreter to modify the behaviour of the UI and to programmatically edit the documents. You can even have Emacs-like keybindings :). What Emacs lacks and TeXmacs has is a sophisticate typesetting engine (i.e. something like TeX) to render complex documents. What Emacs has and TeXmacs lacks is a large user base and dedicated people which develop extensions, but it has a small number of core developers which maintain and use it everyday. It has ~20 years of development history.

The latest Rstudio has visual mode, which lets you write prose in a normal font and code in fixed-width. It's an early iteration, but fairly usable.

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