I'm not sure if this is possible, but does anyone know if I can pipe ESS commands (i.e. evaluate region) to a R process running outside of Emacs? The Emacs terminal hangs up a bit (more often than Apple's terminal) and I'd like to just ditch it, while still using ESS commands. Currently I am doing the less efficient copy and paste technique :-)
Vince
Why not just kill the underlying R process, start a new one and continue the session in the same ESS buffer?
This doesn't answer your specific question and my experience is on Windows, but assuming it's challenging in ESS, I just mention:
There are other IDE's which have no trouble doing this (e.g. Tinn-R, StatET). In particular, for one supported on multiple operating systems, have a look at the StatET plugin for Eclipse. One very nice feature of Eclipse is that not only can you run the commands on a console outside the IDE, but you can also run multiple console sessions at the same time. This allows you to easily compare results side by side.
Needless to say, that's irrelevant if you're comfortable using ESS.