mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Michael Lachmann <address@hidden>]

Hi,

There is a hidden feature of the R session that allows a user to log
to a remote host to execute the R session there. I use it quite a lot,
because my local machine is sometimes not strong enough, so I can ssh
to another machine, and run R there.

The way it works, though in the current version it seems a bit broken,
is that you set two environment variables:
TEXMACS_CMD and TEXMACS_SEND

TEXMACS_CMD you set to a command to execute instead of R. For example 
/bin/tcsh
TEXMACS_SEND you set to a string to send to that command, instead of
the load library command, for example "".
Then you have a shell prompt, you ssh to the remote machine, and then
run R. You still have to load the TeXmacs library on the remote
machine, so you should install it there. And, it is important that you
can log in without a password prompt, because that is not handled.

Quite a complicated procedure...
It has to be a bit flexible, because sometimes you'll have to log to a
gateway and then from there log to the computer you want, or some
such.

Anyway, it would probably be good if one could tell TeXmacs from
within the program which type of session you want - R or shell.
Possibly other session types also benefit from accessing a remote
server.

The question is how to do that best? One could easily have two
different session types - R and R/shell, one starts R, the other
starts a shell, but is ready to interpret R... But I don't think that
is a really good way to handle things.
A fairly good way would be to be able to switch the type of the
session from within a session. So you start a shell session, log to
the remote machine, and then launch R, and switch to an R session.
(But currently it seems that the shell session does not handle ssh
very wel...)

A related question is this: when I run an R session in a buffer, and
then another R session in another buffer, the buffers share the R
seesion - only one instance of R is launched. Sometimes it is useful
to have a second instance. Currently the only way to achieve that is
to launch TeXmacs again, I think.

Michael