Awesome
colorout
colorout is an R package that colorizes R output when running in a Unix (e.g. Linux and OS X) terminal emulator; it does not work on Microsoft Windows. The relevant code is written in C and, thus, it runs very quickly and you should not note any slowdown in R output.
R's stdout
is parsed and numbers, negative numbers, dates in the standard
format, strings, indices, and R constants are identified and wrapped by special
ansi escape codes that are interpreted by terminal emulators as commands to
colorize the output.
R's stderr
is also parsed to identify the expressions "warning" and "error"
and their translations to many languages. If these expressions are found, the
output is colorized accordingly; otherwise, it is colorized as "stderror"
(magenta, by default).
Screenshot:
Installation
You can install the package by running the following commands in a terminal emulator:
git clone https://github.com/jalvesaq/colorout.git
R CMD INSTALL colorout
Some people prefer to use devtools to install packages from github.
NOTES:
-
The package cannot be on CRAN because it changes code already loaded by R and this is prohibited by the CRAN Repository Policy. The package replaces the functions that output results and messages to R Console, and this is necessary because we cannot colorize the output without replacing these functions.
-
Because the package is not on CRAN, it is better to load it with
require()
rather thanlibrary()
to avoid error in your~/.Rprofile
after upgrading R. -
You should load
colorout
only when you can actually see R's output, not when running R non-interactively (see example on the next section). This will avoid unnecessary error messages in some circumstances (in the languageserver log, for instance).
Customization
You can customize the colors according to your preference, guided by the
color table made by the command show256Colors()
.
You can also set the colors to any arbitrary string. In this case, it is
up to you to set valid values.
You can also call the function addPattern()
to set your own patterns to be
colorized.
Example of how to load colorout
from your ~/.Rprofile
:
if (interactive() || isatty(stdout())) {
options(colorout.verbose = 1)
if (require("colorout", quietly = FALSE)) {
# Gruvbox color scheme by @sjlva
colorout::setOutputColors(
index = "\x1b[38;2;215;153;33m",
normal = "\x1b[38;2;235;219;178m",
number = "\x1b[38;2;211;134;155m",
negnum = "\x1b[38;2;104;157;106m",
zero = "\x1b[38;2;69;133;136m",
infinite = "\x1b[38;2;250;189;47m",
string = "\x1b[38;2;184;187;38m",
date = "\x1b[38;2;254;128;25m",
const = "\x1b[38;2;250;189;47m",
true = "\x1b[38;2;142;192;124m",
false = "\x1b[38;2;251;73;52m",
warn = "\x1b[38;2;250;189;47m",
stderror = "\x1b[38;2;204;36;29m",
error = "\x1b[38;2;204;36;29m",
verbose = TRUE
)
}
}
Try different colors and, when happy with your colorscheme, change
colorout.verbose
to 0
, quietly
to TRUE
, and verbose
to FALSE
. If
you don't understand the color codes above, see
https://github.com/jalvesaq/colorout/issues/27#issuecomment-1692518129.