In the Docs section of this web site I spoke, in a rather general way, about the use I make of Open Source Software. I wanted to add to those considerations, with particular reference to Emacs.

The original GNU version of Emacs is perfect for most uses, however, when it comes to using Emacs as your editor for R, it is not easy to configure Emacs for this task. Fortunately someone has come to the rescue on this issue by providing a customized version of Emacs which is packaged specifically to solve this problem (by adding in the Emacs Speaks Statistics package and bundling it with GNU Emacs). The ESS package has a much wider scope than just providing a scripting interface for R, it was designed to provide a scripting interface for other commercial Statistics packages too (among other things) such as, S-Plus, SAS and Stata. All you have to do, then, is to head over to the ESS web site and get hold of the Emacs Speaks Statistics version of Emacs. This way you will have all the power of Emacs with the added benefits provided by the ESS package.