[TxMt] Spreadsheets in Textmate

[Alan Schussman]

On Apr 21, 2006, at 4:40 PM, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:

> I'll also not accept solutions that require X11 and/or are not too  
> easy to install. But if you have some projects in mind. (R.app  
> might do it, I haven't tried it yet. Does it offer a spreadsheet  
> way of editing data?)
>

Its built-in editor isn't so hot, and it doesn't have a data editor,  
but it handles tab- or other-delimted data just fine. I use it to  
calculate grades from a tab-delimited roster that I edit in TM.

> Using R actually sounds like a pretty good good idea, though I  
> don't know much about it yet.
> I actually thought that googling just "r" would be useless, and  
> tried "R language" instead, which indeed gave me some links and  
> much to think about. But it turns out, that searching for "r" also  
> returns the right answer :)

Searches can be hit or miss sometimes. Adding "r-project" to a search  
will often focus in on documentation or mailing lists that are likely  
to have good answers.

> I'll try to incorporate this as an option, like having rows  
> starting with "%R" be passed to R for processing.

You'd also have to pass the data itself to R or load it otherwise.  
I'm not exactly sure how you'd do that, but the bundle could probably  
do it in the background -- pass the sheet contents as a data frame or  
something, the name of which could be specified, while allowing one  
to refer to the data in the format that R would understand. Actually,  
thinking about it more, that would be really pretty cool -- a neat  
way of editing and performing calculations on ad-hoc tables or  
relatively small sets of numbers.

On the subject of R, thanks again to the folks who sent feedback on  
my issue with sending lots of lines to R. I didn't come up with a  
great solution yet, but I threw together a new command that sends  
code via a temporary source file. All indications are that there's a  
bottleneck of some kind in R.app; if anyone else encounters the lock- 
up problem that I had been having, I'm happy to share the command.  
(It's short.)

-Alan