Editors

What is a text editor?

An editor is a text editor that is used to write computer code. If you do not already have a favorite text editor we have created on lpEdit as it was written by our team and designed exactly for the purposes of literate programming.

If you are only interested in using R and \textrm{\LaTeX} then install RStudio. Otherwise if you are looking for a bit more flexibility there are plenty of other editors out there.

Alternative editors that may be useful are the easy-to-use versions of Emacs. For Windows and GNU/Linux this is XEmacs and in the OS X world it is Aquamacs. There many are different editors available, just be sure that you understand the distinction between a text editor and a word processor before you select one. XEmacs and Aquamacs are free, open-source, stable and have all the same shortcuts that Windows and OS X users are accustomed to.

If you have the time and patience the official version of Emacs, although more difficult to use, is a more powerful text editor than the ported versions. The other commonly used text editor that like Emacs requires a bit of a learning curve is Vim.

To use XEmacs

Documentation

Getting started

To create a new file click on buffers. Then click on Go To Buffer and enter the file name.