Because the next official release of Emacs will finally have a built-in package management system, I’ve been able to update the Emacs Starter Kit for the Social Sciences to make it easier to set up. AucTeX is now installed directly as a package, and so is ESS. While the AucTeX package is official, I host the ESS package myself. I haven’t made any changes to ESS, just added a short .el file that the package manager needs. (In particular, an “official” ESS package would be smaller, as some configuration files wouldn’t be required — you can look at the AucTeX package at the official package repo to get a sense of this.)

To go with these changes, I’ve also revised my Choosing Your Workflow Applications paper, and made the .org source file for the paper available on GitHub. The idea is that the Starter Kit and the workflow article can be used together to introduce beginning grad students (and other interested parties) to some useful software tools.