Running Rdevtool::test_that on buffer save in ESS - r

My workflow:
Hack away at an .R or test_*.R file
Save buffer.
Switch to window with *R* process
hit C-p, RET. to re-evaluate devtools::test()
To me, this seems far too arduous. Why can't I get R to run devtools::test() automatically when I save the buffer? Please help, my fingers can barely take the strain of the seven extra keystrokes!

This worked for a similar setup (switching to a shell buffer):
(defun devtools-test ()
(interactive)
(when (string-match (rx-to-string `(: ".R" eos) t) (buffer-name))
(switch-to-buffer "*R*")
(end-of-buffer)
(insert "devtools::test()")
(comint-send-input)))
(add-hook 'after-save-hook 'devtools-test)
Does that work for you?

For completeness, there are easier way to do this in recent versions of ESS.
The function/command ess-r-devtools-test now runs devtools::test.
So you could achieve this with (untested):
(add-hook 'ess-r-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(add-hook 'after-save-hook 'devtools-test nil 'local)))
In addition, there are many other useful functions under ess-r-devtools-* for build, install etc.
It's worth noting that calling ess-r-devtools-test with the universal argument will filter tests by the current file.
So calling C-u M-x ess-r-devtools from a file my-file.R will run devtools::test(filter="my-file").
This can be useful to bear in mind when choosing names for test files, or when rerunning only the current test file.

There is a ess-eval-linewise function which you can use.
Something like this (not tested):
(defun devtools-test ()
(interactive)
(when (and (equal ess-dialect "R")
(string-match "^test.*\\.[Rr]$" (buffer-name)))
(ess-eval-linewise "devtools::test()")))
(add-hook 'after-save-hook 'devtools-test)
I would not recommend this though, as for some packages tests take quite a while to run. You don't want them running on every save.
There will be a dedicated devtools functionality in ess soon. Follow this issue.

Related

SBCL Compiler Diagnostic Messages (missing with a "when" with no body)

By accident, I recently came across a latent coding error in one of my functions, dealing with a when statement. A reduced paraphrase might look like:
(defparameter a 0)
(when (or (= a 0)
(= a 1)
(* a a)))
The problem is a misplaced parenthesis, so it actually is
(when (or (= a 0)
(= a 1)
(* a a)))
In a situation like this, wouldn't it be useful for the compiler to generate either a style warning or note? It seems to me that the meaning of a when statement normally implies a condition and a body, even though the body is strictly optional. Of course, a print pretty would have caught this in the editor, but I had copied it from elsewhere. Is there a reason that SBCL does not check for these kinds of mistakes?
a print pretty would have caught this in the editor
To discuss the options, I know about:
trivial-formatter will format the source code.
(trivial-formatter:fmt :your-system :supersede)
cl-indentify indents the source code. Has a command line utility. I tried it once and it was not bad, but different than Emacs' indentation, thus annoying for me.
$ cl-indentify bar.lisp
It links to lispindent but I was less happy with its result.
However, the best would be to not only format the code and re-read it ourselves, but to
run checks against a set of rules to warn against code smells
This is what proposes the lisp-critic. It can critique a function or a file. However:
(edit) it doesn't really have a Slime integration, we have to either critique a function or a whole file.
if you feel adventurous, see an utility of mine here. It could be an easier way to test snippets that you enter at the REPL.
it hasn't the rule about when without a body (we can easily add it)
And it would be best that the run failed with an error status code if it found a code smell. Again, a little project of mine in beta tries to do that, see here. It doesn't have much rules now, but I just pushed a check for this. You can call the script:
$colisper.sh tests/playground.lisp
it shows an error (but doesn't write it in-place by default):
|;; when with no body
|(when (or (= a 0)
| (= a 1)
!| (* a a))
!| (error "colisper found a 'when' with a missing body. (we should error the script without this rewrite!)"))
and returns with an exit code, so we can use it has a git hook or on a CI pipeline.
The problem is that if a human writes (when x) (or whatever that expands into, perhaps (if x (progn) nil)) this is probably a mistake, but when a program writes it it may well not be: it may be just some edge case that the program hasn't been smart enough to optimize completely away. And a huge amount of code that the compiler processes is written by programs, not humans.

How do I use the live-code feature in sbcl?

I am trying to get live-coding to work in lisp. i have the file t.cl which contains only this line: (loop(write(- 2 1))). Now, when i run the file in bash with sbcl --load t.cl --eval '(quit)', it runs the line, but when I try to edit the file in another terminal and save it while it runs, nothing changes ..
Why your example fails
When running sbcl --load t.cl --eval '(quit)' in a shell, what this does is spin-up a SBCL Lisp image in a process, compile the file and run it. You then modify the file and save it to your disk. This last action is of no concern to the already running SBCL process, which has already compiled the previous file. SBCL read the file once when you asked it to, once it has the compiled instructions to run, it has no reason to look at the file again unless you explicitly ask it to.
A 'live' example with Emacs+SLIME
In order to perform 'live' changes to your running program, you must interact with the already running Lisp image. This is easily doable with Emacs+Slime. You can, for example, have a loop like so:
(defun foo (x) (+ x 3))
(dotimes (it 20)
(format t "~A~%" (foo it))
(sleep 1))
and then recompile foo during execution within the REPL with a new definition:
(defun foo (x) (+ x 100))
Another thread will be used to recompile the function. The new function will be used for future calls as soon as its compilation is finished.
The output in the REPL will look like:
3
4
5
CL-USER> (defun foo (x) (+ x 100))
WARNING: redefining COMMON-LISP-USER::FOO in DEFUN
FOO
103
104
105
...
This would also work with the new definition of foo being compiled from another file as opposed to being entered directly in the REPL.
Working from the system shell
While you can already use the example above for development purposes, you might want to interact with a running SBCL Lisp image from the shell. I am not aware of how to do that. For your exact example, you want to get SBCL to reload eventual files that you have modified. A brief look at the SBCL manual doesn't seem to provide ways to pipe lisp code to an already running SBCL process.

Inferior-lisp not responding on sldb-quit

I just started learning common lisp, so excuse me if lisp terminology is a bit off. I installed slime and am using Clozure CL. ccl is working just fine. When I enter a wrong expression, the debugger opens (slbc ccl/1 buffer). When I enter q, the debugger buffer closes, and then the inferior-lisp buffer does not respond. Why is that?
and if I want to continue work, I seem to have to restart inferior-lisp, what is it I am doing wring?
I just wanted to say put out the solution I found.
I had followed the instructions in the slime's user manual (from here), I used MALPA repository to install slime.
As PuercoPop's says in the comments, i should land in a slime-repl buffer, which I didn't have by default. I did some further digging and learnt that i have to add a few more line to my .emacs file for the slime-repl buffer to load. The line needed was
(slime-setup '(slime-fancy))
My final .emacs file looks like this:
(require 'package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives
'("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/"))
(when (< emacs-major-version 24)
(add-to-list 'package-archives '("gnu" . "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/")))
(package-initialize)
(setq package-enable-at-startup nil)
(setq inferior-lisp-program "F:/Binaries/ccl/wx86cl64.exe")
(setq slime-auto-connect 'ask)
(setq slime-net-coding-system 'utf-8-unix)
(require 'slime)
(slime-setup
'(slime-fancy slime-asdf slime-references slime-indentation slime-xref-browser)
)

How can I automate these emacs ESS (ess-remote) commands?

I'm using a local emacs instance (aquamacs) to run R processes on a remote server, and I'd like to automate the process of connecting to my server. The process is as follows:
[in emacs]
M-x shell
[in the resulting console]
TERM=xterm
ssh -Y -C <my remote server>
screen -rd [and/or] R
[in emacs]
M-x ess-remote
r
I discovered this general approach here: http://blog.nguyenvq.com/2010/07/11/using-r-ess-remote-with-screen-in-emacs/. The -Y -C options allow you use xterm to view plots. I don't know lisp and tho I've googled around a bit, I can't seem to piece together how to actually define a function to automate this (e.g., in .emacs.el). Has anyone implemented anything like this?
Let's assume you just want to call shell in code. In Lisp, everything is prefix notation surrounded by parentheses. So we enter this into a buffer (say, the scratch buffer):
(shell)
Move your pointer to the end of the line after the close-paren, and type <C-x C-e> to execute the Lisp code. You should see that the shell function is called.
Now, let's make it a function, so we can add other things to it. The command to create a function is defun, and it takes the name of the function, the argument list (in parentheses), and then the body of the function:
(defun automate-connection ()
(shell))
Move your cursor to the end of the code, hit <C-x C-e>, and the function will be defined. You can call it from Lisp by executing
(automate-connection)
Ok, now we just need to put some text into the shell buffer.
(defun automate-connection ()
(shell)
(insert "TERM=xterm"))
Now, when we run that, we get "TERM=xterm" put into the shell buffer. But it doesn't actually send the command. Let's try putting a newline.
(defun automate-connection ()
(shell)
(insert "TERM=xterm\n"))
That puts in a newline, but doesn't actually make the command run. Why not? Let's see what the enter key does. Go to your *shell* buffer, and type <C-h c>, then hit the return key. (<C-h c> runs describe-key-briefly, which prints the name of the function invoked by hitting the given key). That says that when you hit RET, it's not putting a newline, but actually calling comint-send-input. So let's do that:
(defun automate-connection ()
(shell)
(insert "TERM=xterm")
(comint-send-input))
Now, when you run `(automate-connection) from any Lisp code, you should get the given thing sent. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to add your other commands.
But wait! We're not really done, are we? I assume you don't want to have to move to a Lisp scratch buffer, type in (automate-connection), then evaluate that code. You probably just want to type , and call it a day. You can't do that by default with the function we just created. Luckily, it's simple to allow that: just add a call to (interactive) in your function:
(defun automate-connection ()
(interactive)
(shell)
(insert "TERM=xterm")
(comint-send-input))
Now you can call it as you want, and it'll open the *shell* buffer, put in the text, and tell Emacs to tell the shell to run that text.

ESS: ess-request-a-process defaults to "S"

Quite often I find myself with bunch of R processes running in ESS buffers. There's a convenient Lisp function ess-request-a-process that asks for R process, and brings it to front. The only downside is that it somehow defaults to S, so each time I'm about to make a switch, I have to type R, ad nauseam.
I tried customising the ess-language variable, but even if I set value to "R", i.e. 4 for current session, or even if I save settings for future session, as soon as I type C-c C-k, automagically S appears once again. It's very annoying, and I really don't want to end up with C-x C-b and then C-s for desired R session! =)
I even tried setting (setq-default ess-language "R") in .emacs, but with no luck...
BTW, I'm running Emacs v. 23.1.1 on Linux Mint and Emacs v. 23.2 on Arch Linux, with ESS v. 5.12. If that's relevant, I run Emacs from terminal with -nw argument. Here's my .emacs:
;; start server
(server-start)
;; load ESS
(require 'ess-site)
(require 'ess-rutils)
;; set HTML help as default
(setq inferior-ess-r-help-command "help(\"%s\", help_type = \"html\")\n")
(custom-set-variables
;; custom-set-variables was added by Custom.
;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.
;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.
'(ess-help-kill-bogus-buffers t)
'(ess-rutils-keys nil)
'(show-paren-mode t))
(custom-set-faces
;; custom-set-faces was added by Custom.
;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.
;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.
)
(put 'upcase-region 'disabled nil)
So... how to set R once and for all? (I don't use S/S+/SAS)
I did not know about this function so far. C-c C-k is bound to ess-force-buffer-current in ESS buffers.
[edit: C-c C-k is indeed bound to ess-request-a-process in iESS, in ESS it's ess-force-buffer-current]
In any case the variable you have to customize is ess-dialect
(setq-default ess-dialect "R")
It's buffer-local variable and some other stuff in ess-mode-hook might set it a different value.
Check it in each buffer with C-h v ess-dialect
Additionally, if you already running several processes then ess-switch-process (C-c C-s) might be the right way to go.
[edit: it will not jump to a process but just reset the associated process of the current ESS buffer]
[edit: After dwelling deeper on the issue it turned out that ess-request-a-process uses ess-language variable were the ess-dialect seems to be more appropriate. The problem is that each time an ess-inferior process starts it resets the global value of ess-language. This is why setting it in your case didn't work.
Here is a quick fix:
(defun ess-set-language ()
(setq-default ess-language "R")
(setq ess-language "R")
)
(add-hook 'ess-post-run-hook 'ess-set-language t)
]

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