Live data from Hacker News

Emacs for Data Science

insightdatascience.com

31–38 of 38 posts

Re: Emacs for Data Science

#31
post #29

I recently discovered org-mode. Honestly, it is by far the best note-taking application I've ever used, especially in any math-heavy field, since it supports cross-references and most math symbols. And unlike LaTeX which ends up filled with markup, org stays very clean. However the basic export (to HTML and pdf) is not that good. There's also support for basic spreadsheeting, but it gets very slow as soon as you have…

"However the basic export (to HTML and pdf) is not that good." What are you referring to here? It's easy enough to customize the export formatting to whatever you want it to be, e.g., change LaTeX document class, switch to xetex for better font support, etc.

My biggest gripe is that it won't recognize that a block of text is math, unless I enclose it with $, which would then clutter the org file.

Re: Emacs for Data Science

#32
I have been using emacs for over 15 years. I still discover new things. I am working on a distributed project and found tramp mode about a year ago. Its amazing for multi-hop remote editing. Worth the price of admission alone.

Re: Emacs for Data Science

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you use auctex shortcuts when writing LaTeX code in orgmode?

What kind of shortcuts? Most LaTeX symbols will be replaced with their unicode counterpart, eg. \theta will become θ inline, once you toggle `entitiespretty' with C-c C-x \. Likewise for superscript and index, it changes as you type. My equation blocks are created with M-o M-s which centers the current line in the buffer (when in fill-mode), so no need for C-c C-e equation.

Wait...I don't get how M-o M-s can replace C-c C-e. Am I missing something? That was the main one I was thinking of...

Re: Emacs for Data Science

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long time emacs user, it's great to know that it can grow to support new languages and environments. I wasn't aware that it supports Octave (the music language). Welcome to emacs, we hope you enjoy your stay!

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Der... One of my favorite things in emacs. When confronted with an arcane, custom "language" developed 30 years ago because of some immediate need without serious care taken. You can create a custom mode that gives you syntax highlighting, indentation support and other things fairly quickly. And it beats the built-in "editors" present in a lot of tools, especia…

This sort of thing is where I've found emacs most valuable. For proprietary or product-specific configuration and scripting languages, particularly ones where no decent editor is provided at all (or there's some terrible builtin editor, based on SciTE at the very best), being able to quickly put together an emacs major mode is very handy.

Once you've got the basics written, you can start to work. Then add imenu support, and you have file browsing. Then add your language to exuberant ctags - which has a line-based regexp mode that you can pretty much reuse your imenu regexps for - and get it to generate emacs-compatible tags files, and you've got basic cross-file symbol navigation.

(The quality of ctags-based symbol browsing can be hit or miss - for languages like Java or C++, where many mechanisms require symbols to be identically-named, it's not that great. But not-that-great is still a lot more convenient than nothing.)

Re: Emacs for Data Science

#37

I have been using Sublimetext since few years. Its extremely productive. Could anyone explain the advantage of Emacs over Sublime?

Sublime doesn't interact very nicely with the terminal. There is a repl plugin, but it is slow and outdated. Is ctr-enter to send text to ipython that much to ask for?

If you use multiple platforms, you're gonna have a tough time remembering the keyboard shortcuts as some of them are totally different.

I haven't switched from sublime to Emacs, but it promises to fix all those things in exchange for more complexity.

Post reply on HN