mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>]

Hi Michael,

I did some experiments with remote sessions in the past.
In principle, when launching ssh with the right flags plug-ins launched
over a pipe behave *exactly* the same way as on your local machine.
One important thing is that you *must* set up the necessary keys
in your personal .ssh so that log-in does *not* require a password.

If you have the courage, please refigure out how to do the above
(I forgot in the meantime), and give a more precise procedure.
We might then consider a Remote session menu in which a remote host,
or even a sequence of remote hosts could be specified,
which could be used as a wrapper for any plug-in.

Best wishes, --Joris


On Fri, Nov 06, 2009 at 04:25:21PM +0100, Michael Lachmann wrote:
> 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