I second Phil's request.
This is long overdue. Stata owes its success to its open design but
for what must be a good reason StataCorp opted not to open up the
editor for any customization or extension.
I've in the past proposed a solution among the lines of the Stata
plugin: a simple API that allows specially modified external editors
to pass lines of code to Stata for execution and returns the _rc code
(and perhaps the error message) to the caller. From where I sit, the
task seems almost trivial but again I do not know anything about the
innards of Stata.
I have all respect to Stata developers who always produced solid code
and innovative solutions, but the editor remains painfully inadequate
despite many recent improvements. I still copy and paste into an
external editor to do any serious "find and replace" operations or to
do column selection. So some essential functions in the editor need
to be improved. But as Phil said, people love their editors and it
might be just easier and cheaper for StataCorp to allow them to plug
in their favorite editors.
Hope StataCorp is listening.
salah mahmud
Canada
On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 8:36 AM, Phil Schumm <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Jun 14, 2008, at 11:18 AM, Christopher Intemann wrote:
>>
>> For instance, I'm writing my scripts using emacs in stata mode. However,
>> there is no way to run them (or parts from them) directly from emacs. It
>> would be nice if the upcomming stata release would offer an interface for
>> external editors.
>
>
> If all you want to do is to run the file you're editing (or selected
> portions of it) in Stata, then you can use an "Open" Apple Event to do this.
> For more information, see the section on Macintosh editors in
> http://fmwww.bc.edu/repec/bocode/t/textEditors.html. I'm not an emacs user,
> but IIRC, it has a "do-applescript" command that you can use for this; I
> thought it had been incorporated into Bill Rising's Stata mode for emacs,
> but perhaps not. I have used this approach with AlphaX (and now TextMate)
> and it works quite well.
>
> In fact, with the OS X executable update dated 25feb2008, this approach now
> works even better. Prior to that, when Stata had finished processing a
> file it would notify you via OS X's notification system (i.e., bouncing icon
> in the dock), and wouldn't accept any further requests until you had
> responded to the notification by switching focus to Stata. After the
> update, Stata no longer waits to accept new requests, and there is a
> preference item so that you can disable notification all together. These
> changes make working with external editors on OS X much nicer.
>
> The question of whether StataCorp should add features to its do-file editor
> has been addressed several times before on the list. As several have noted,
> many of the users who find it inadequate would also find inadequate any
> editor except their preferred one. These users want to be able to use the
> same text editor for everything (e.g., data-analytic work, coding, writing,
> etc.), and have invested considerable effort in learning how to use their
> text editor efficiently and/or customizing it to suit their needs.
> StataCorp may decide to add features to their do-file editor in the future
> (since, clearly, there are a lot of users who use it), however my suggestion
> would be to take your preferred editor and figure out how to use it well
> with Stata; that way, you'll be happy whatever StataCorp does.
>
>
> -- Phil
>
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>
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