Emacs Speaks Statistics (ESS) in MacPorts

August 28, 2012

Emacs Speaks Statistics (ESS) is an Emacs package for interacting with, and programming for, statistical packages such as R, Stata, SAS, etc. MacPorts is a repository of open source software for OS X. MacPorts is very similar to the apt-get system on Debian, making it easy to install software packages from the repository and keep them up to date.

While there is a very nice Emacs port (emacs-app) in the MacPorts repository, until today there was no port for ESS. So, recently I submitted a Portfile for it. This morning it was added to the official repository. So, you can now install ESS from MacPorts by simply typing the following:

sudo port install ess

If you installed Emacs using the emacs-app port (as opposed to emacs), then you’ll want to install the emacs_app variant of ess instead:

sudo port install ess +emacs_app