README.md

In cheetahR: High Performance Tables Using 'Cheetah Grid'

cheetahR

cheetahR is an R package that brings the power of Cheetah Grid to R. Designed for speed and efficiency, cheetahR will allow you to render millions of rows in just a few milliseconds, making it an excellent alternative to reactable and other R table widgets. The goal of cheetahR is to wrap the JavaScript functions of Cheetah Grid and make them readily available for R users, providing a seamless and high-performance table widget for R applications.

Features

• Ultra-fast rendering of large datasets.
• Lightweight and efficient memory usage.
• Customizable styling and formatting.
• Smooth scrolling and interaction.
• Seamless integration with R and Shiny.

Installation

You can install cheetahR from GitHub:

pak::pak("cynkra/cheetahR")

Getting Started

So far, cheetah() is available to render a dataframe in R

library(cheetahR)

# Render table
cheetah(iris)

# Change some feature of some columns in the data
cheetah(
  iris,
  columns = list(
    Sepal.Length = column_def(name = "Sepal_Length"),
    Sepal.Width = column_def(name = "Sepal_Width", width = 100)
  )
)

API Integration

cheetahR is compatible with Shiny, allowing for dynamic and interactive tables in web applications. Although still a work in progress.

Contributing

We welcome contributions! If you’d like to help improve cheetahR, feel free to submit issues, feature requests, or pull requests.

Software Pre-requiste

To contribute to this project, some software installations are required, such as npm, node, and packer. Please follow the slides attached to help you get started pre-requisites. Click here to install packer.

When you are in the project, do the following:

packer::npm_install()
# Change the code and then rebundle
packer::bundle("development") # For developement mode
packer::bundle() # For production. Defaut!

You may as well bundle for dev using packer::bundle_dev() when in developer mode and when ready for production use packer::bundle_prod(). You may also consider watch() which watches for changes in the srcjs and rebuilds if necessary, equivalent to ⁠npm run watch⁠.

Debugging steps

1. Once you run a function, for instance, cheetah(iris), open the viewer on a web browser window (preferably Chrome as it is used to illustrate the action in this step). Note! Other browser pages may differ.
2. Right-click on the widget and navigate to the “inspect” option on the drop-down menu
3. At the top, where the tabs are displayed, navigate to the “Sources” tab. Open from the sidepanel “cheetahr/srcjs/widgets/cheetah.js” script
4. Once the “cheetah.js” is opened on the main panel. You can set a breakpoint on any line number of the script and reload the page.

Acknowledgments

This package is built on top of the amazing Cheetah Grid JavaScript library.

cheetahR documentation built on Aug. 9, 2025, 1:07 a.m.