Useful Stata Stuff

The ado-mode for Emacs

The ado-mode is a major [editing] mode for Emacs which allows truly good editing of Stata, namely do, ado, sthlp, smcl, and mata files. Here is a screenshot to see what the highlighting does. The mode also handles indentation, date stamps, and includes templates for writing help files, project do-files and the like.

Emacs versions back to 25.1 are supported.

Here is the change log which says what is new.

The current version is 1.18.5.1, which is made for Stata 18.0. It works just fine with earlier versions of Stata, but it will highlight commands as though you were using Stata 18.0.

Here are the things which make life easier when using the ado-mode.

• ado-mode can communicate well with Stata itself, sending code directly to Stata for evaluation. This works macOS, and MS Windows and Linux.
• Ability to open the help file for the current command.
• Ability to open any ado file on the default ado-path, even automagically opening the ado-file for the current command.
• Context-sensitive highlighting keeps typos to a minimum. Stata's commands and keywords are highlighted if abbreviated correctly.
• Commands which need subcommands are highlighted differently, so that you know a subcommand is needed.
• Downloaded and personal user-written commands can be automatically highlighted once Emacs knows where they are kept.
• Templates for common files, such as do-files which keep their own logs, ado-files, do-files made for testing and debugging ado-files, and (most importantly, perhaps) Stata help files.
• Automatic indentation so that long if, foreach, forvalues, and while blocks get closed. Many types of indentation styles are supported.
• The name of the ado file always matches the name of the program defined, even if you change the program's name.
• Ado-files get a automatically-updated time stamp which can be formatted in a variety of ways.
• Stata's smcl directives are correctly highlighted, which saves time when writing help files.
• Parentheses, braces and double-quotes are balanced.
• Auto-completion can be enabled via M-x auto-complete-mode or M-x company-mode, among other minor modes. Both highlight common words and words already used in the buffer being edited. auto-complete-mode comes with Emacs while company-mode can be downloaded from Melpa via M-x list-packages.

The easiest way to install ado-mode is to use the package package built into Emacs. The package is hosted on MELPA package manager site; here are the instructions for getting started with MELPA.

If you want to tinker with it, you can grab it from github and fork away: https://github.com/louabill/ado-mode.

If you are unreasonably distrustful of package managers and github, and still believe in doing things the hard way, the zipped current version can be obtained by clicking here.

Bugs and requests can be put on github.

Anyways, here are the installation instructions.

Please let me know if there are any troubles with the installations, since there are little quirks with cross-platform Emacs stuff.

ado-mode is on Twitter: @ado-mode. The real reason for this is to have an easy RSS feed for finding out about updates: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/106578815.rss

If you are curious about Emacs, here is some more info. It is very dated, but it conveys the feeling well. If you are sold, and want to get a copy, here are more instructions.

If you are intrigued about using editors for editing Stata code in a nicer way than the built-in do-file editor works, try checking out the unofficial FAQ on text editors and Stata.