Colorful Output in R Console
Typical saturday morning, so I make pain perdu from
this week’s bread leftovers to make up for the FOMO related to the #runconf17
hashtag on twitter.
As every year, ROpenSci’s unconf looks amazing, and it definitely looks like a lot went on if I believe the tweetstorm and various announcements. One particular tweet that caught my attention was this tweet about the available package.
Our package is a package to help you name packages - @jimhester_ https://t.co/VtezsB08ZI#runconf17 pic.twitter.com/b5sW00CMbE
— Karthik Ram (@_inundata) May 27, 2017
Sounds like a nice implementation of a cool idea. But that’s not what woke me up, as
I already had seen mentions of available. What surprised me was the use of color in the
rstudio console output. It could only mean one thing, rstudio now supports colored outputs
we this far could only used on capable terminals through the
crayon package, and indeed here’s the
relevant extract of the NEWS.md file
For this to work for me, I had to download a daily build
of rstudio, update the rstudioapi and
crayon packages, or as I’d like to call
it “saturday morning”, and then I could enjoy some color:
This is not a new interest to me, I played with color on the terminal back in
2009
with the xterm256 package, at the time I used it to print a pixelized
version of the retro R logo and colors around France’s
“liberté, égalité, fraternité”.
but having this supported in rstudio is opening another kind of Pandora’s box. I feel like my parents when color first appeared on television.
… but with more exciting content. Unsurprisingly Hadley is already using this,
and his colformat package looks
promising, and I can’t wait to see how this will be used in
tibble
