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Thomas Lumley’s Stata mode, written around 1996, was also folded into ESS.

Tom Cook added functions to submit jobs, review listing and log files, and produce basic views of a dataset, thus creating a SAS-mode which was distributed in 1994. In 1997, Rossini merged S-mode and SAS-mode into a single Emacs package for statistical programming; the product of this marriage was called ESS version 5. Heiberger designed the inferior mode for interactive SAS and SAS-mode was further integrated into ESS.

Finally, an incidental (but very useful) side-effect of ESS is that a transcript of your session is kept for later saving or editing.

No special knowledge of Emacs is necessary when using R interactively under ESS.

Emacs Speaks Statistics (ESS) provides an intelligent, consistent interface between the user and the software.

ESS interfaces with R, SAS, S-PLUS, BUGS/JAGS and other statistical analysis packages on GNU/Linux, other Unix-like systems such as mac OS, and Microsoft Windows.