I wrote my first vignette for an R package the other day and was amazed at the ease of writing Rmarkdown. Of course, I am using emacs and was looking for a mode that would allow me to edit these files smoothly with syntax highlighting and the ability to send code chunks to R automatically. Et voila — Polymode. I followed the John Stanton-Geddes instructions for enabling markdown-mode and polymode, but ran up against a few minor issues. The first was that copying and pasting the LISP code into my .emacs file introduced some errors — single quotes turned into backticks and doublequotes turned into smart quotes. In the end, I had to reformat these/type them in myself.
I also found that I needed to add the line:
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.Rmd" . poly-markdown+r-mode))
to my .emacs file for polymode to start automatically when I opened a .Rmd file. This was mentioned in the polymode instructions which I should probably have read first. The full entries in my .emacs file for markdown-mode and polymode are:
;;; Markdown mode
(autoload 'markdown-mode "markdown-mode" "Major mode for editing Markdown files" t)
(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.markdown" . markdown-mode) auto-mode-alist))
(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.md" . markdown-mode) auto-mode-alist))
(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.ronn?" . markdown-mode) auto-mode-alist))
;;; Polymode
(setq load-path (append '("/home/sbonner/.emacs.d/polymode/" "/home/sbonner/.emacs.d/polymode/modes") load-path))
(require 'poly-R)
(require 'poly-markdown)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.Rmd" . poly-markdown+r-mode))
Looking great!