Customising your R experience

James Laird-Smith

Link to slides: customising-r.jameslairdsmith.com/
Repo for talk: jameslairdsmith/talk-customising-R

Intro

R
- Is already a fantastic environment for interactive programming.
- Already has a fantastic IDE in RStudio.
Most people use only the default workflows of these tools.

In this webinar, I’ll be teaching you about customising your R experience using ‘workflow shortcuts’.

What is a workflow shortcut?

It’s my collective term for a set of things that already exist:

Keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys)
Interactive convenience functions (or snippets)
IDE options
Start-up scripts

Some of these things you already know, but some will be new (and life changing).

RStudio

It’s a surprisingly extensible IDE.
I’m focusing on it because I know a lot of people use it.

Other magical editors:

Emacs! (Using the ESS package)
VS Code (R extension).
Vim

.Rprofile caution

There are two main things you want to bear in mind.

You don’t want to compromise the reproducibility of your scripts,
- For example, setting options(max.print = 40) is acceptable, because it only affects the output that you see at the console.
- Including library(tidyverse) is not acceptable, because readers of your script then won’t know that you’ve loaded the package.

You don’t want to unconditionally load packages.
- This can cause problems for package installs.
- The best way to do this is to wrap code in functions and only call them when you need them.

My .Rprofile (1): preferences

options(max.print = 40)
options(connectionObserver = NULL)
# ^ connectionObserver at work just gets in the way.
options(tidyverse.quiet = TRUE)
options(styler.cache_root = "styler-perm")

Also includes packages options, which are fine to set.

My .Rprofile (2): logic

Work out whether I am on RStudio or not.

on_rstudio <- function() {
  if (commandArgs()[[1L]] == "RStudio") {
    return(TRUE)
  }
  FALSE
}

I have a whole Twitter thread about how this is the best way to do this and other methods are wrong.

This code then enables you to write other code more easily like if(on_rstudio()) etc.

My .Rprofile (3): helpers

Helper functions at_work() and my_email().

at_work <- function() {
  if(Sys.info()["user"] == "jameslaird-smith") return(FALSE)
  TRUE
}

my_email <- function() {
  if(at_work()) return("James.Laird-Smith@bankofengland.co.uk")
  "jameslairdsmith@gmail.com"
}at_work <- function() {
  if(Sys.info()["user"] == "jameslaird-smith") return(FALSE)
  TRUE
}

my_email <- function() {
  if(at_work()) return("James.Laird-Smith@bankofengland.co.uk")
  "jameslairdsmith@gmail.com"
}

My .Rprofile (6): RStudio preferences

setHook("rstudio.sessionInit", function(newSession) {
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("editor_keybindings", "vim")
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("save_workspace", "never")
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("always_save_history", FALSE)
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("save_files_before_build", TRUE)
}, action = "append")setHook("rstudio.sessionInit", function(newSession) {
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("editor_keybindings", "vim")
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("save_workspace", "never")
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("always_save_history", FALSE)
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("save_files_before_build", TRUE)
}, action = "append")setHook("rstudio.sessionInit", function(newSession) {
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("editor_keybindings", "vim")
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("save_workspace", "never")
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("always_save_history", FALSE)
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("save_files_before_build", TRUE)
}, action = "append")setHook("rstudio.sessionInit", function(newSession) {
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("editor_keybindings", "vim")
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("save_workspace", "never")
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("always_save_history", FALSE)
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("save_files_before_build", TRUE)
}, action = "append")setHook("rstudio.sessionInit", function(newSession) {
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("editor_keybindings", "vim")
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("save_workspace", "never")
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("always_save_history", FALSE)
  rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("save_files_before_build", TRUE)
}, action = "append")

Conclusion

R is already a fantastic interactive programming environment.
RStudio is already a fantastic IDE.

Both R and RStudio are also highly configurable and so allow you to cusomise your experience of using them.
The R community could benefit from more config sharing.
I’ve created the customiser package to make this easier.

Thank you!

Questions?

Customising your R experience

Intro

What is a workflow shortcut?

Motivation: workflow

RStudio

RStudio (2)

RStudio add-in example 1: datapasta

RStudio add-in example 2: WrapRmd

RStudio add-in example 3: styler

RStudio add-in example 4: shrtcts

Customising R