colorout-package: Colorize R output on terminal emulators

In jalvesaq/colorout: Colorize R Output on Terminal Emulators

Colorize R output on terminal emulators

Description

Colorize R output when it is running on a Unix terminal emulator. The library also works within RStudio, but there is no support for other Graphical User Interfaces, such as Windows RGui, RKward, JGR, Rcmdr that cannot display ANSI colors. It also did not work with Emacs with ess. The functions of this package only work if R is compiled for Unix systems (e.g., Linux and OS X) and it is running interactively in a terminal emulator. The terminal emulator might have been called by a text editor, such as Vim, Gedit, Kate or Geany.

Homepage: https://github.com/jalvesaq/colorout

Screenshot:

Details

The terminal must support Select Graphic Rendition (SGR, also known as ANSI escape codes or sequences), otherwise you may see garbage like this:

    > rnorm(5)
    [32m[ [33m1 [32m] [0m [32m  [33m0.07574585 [32m [0m [32m
    [33m0.88167822 [32m [0m [32m  [33m0.60788656 [32m [0m [32m
    [33m1.13590951 [32m [0m [32m  [33m1.07758879 [32m [0m [32m [0m
  

The package contains a C library with a function that replaces the default Rstd_WriteConsoleEx which, when enabled, is responsible for printing messages in the Console when R is running in interactive mode. R should be built against libreadline since libedit may cause issues.

The function that enables the colorization of R output is ColorOut, and it is called automatically when the package is loaded. However, it will do nothing if Sys.getenv("TERM") returns either "" or "dumb". The output will not be colorized also if the result of either interactive() or isatty(stdout()) is FALSE. You can change this behavior by putting in your ‘⁠~/.Rprofile⁠’ one or more of the following options:

    options(colorout.verbose = 0)
    options(colorout.anyterm = TRUE)
    options(colorout.dumb = TRUE)
    options(colorout.noninteractive = TRUE)
    options(colorout.notatty = TRUE)
  

With colorout.anyterm == TRUE, the package will not check the ‘⁠TERM⁠’ environment variable, and it will also not test whether R is running interactively. If your terminal emulator is capable of displaying ANSI colors but is not being recognized you may put the following in your ‘⁠~/.Rprofile⁠’:

    if(interactive()){
        options(colorout.anyterm = TRUE)
        library(colorout)
    }
  

And of course, you can use any arbitrary condition to decide whether to load colorout or not. For instance:

    if(isatty(stdout())){
        options(colorout.anyterm = TRUE)
        library(colorout)
    }
  

If colorout.verbose > 0, the package will display a warning if the output is not going to be colorized.

A 256 color scheme is used by default. If your terminal emulator only supports 8 colors, you will have to set your own color scheme. Please, see the example at setOutputColors.

Author(s)

Jakson Alves de Aquino [e-mail] and Dominique-Laurent Couturier [e-mail].

See Also

ColorOut, noColorOut, setOutputColors, show256Colors and setZero. The package setwidth updates the value of options("width") automatically when the terminal is resized.

jalvesaq/colorout documentation built on Feb. 27, 2024, 2:46 p.m.