Thanks to Alyssa Frazee I just learned about the colorout package (Aquino, 2013). It modifies R so that the output is in different colors, making it much more pleasant to use R in the terminal.

Do note that colorout is not available from CRAN, but you can easily install by following the instructions on the colorout site (Official site) reproduced below:

download.file("http://www.lepem.ufc.br/jaa/colorout_1.0-2.tar.gz", destfile = "colorout_1.0-2.tar.gz")
install.packages("colorout_1.0-2.tar.gz", type = "source", repos = NULL)

The next step is to then load colorout automatically when I start R. The problem is that I don’t use R solely on the terminal. I easily figured out how to do so thanks to the error message you get when attempting to load colorout on the R GUI. I thus ended up adding the following lines to my .Rprofile (both locally and in the cluster):

## Change colors when running R in the terminal
if (Sys.getenv("TERM") == "xterm-256color") library("colorout")

Now I have pretty R output in the terminal! Thanks again Alyssa! See her original tweet below:

problem: R output in Terminal isn't colorful. SOLUTION: http://t.co/Vd6OoRoUU5

— Alyssa Frazee (@acfrazee) February 17, 2014

colorout has been around for a while and was even at CRAN for some time. I guess that I’m just late to the party.

If the default colorout colors don’t work for you, check functions such as setOutputColors256. This post shows how you can do it and includes screenshots of the output. Other package details are included here and here.

References

Citations made with knitcitations (Boettiger, 2014).

• Jakson Aquino, (2013) colorout: Colorize R output on terminal emulators. http://www.lepem.ufc.br/jaa/colorout.html
• colorout. http://www.lepem.ufc.br/jaa/colorout.html
• Carl Boettiger, (2014) knitcitations: Citations for knitr markdown files. http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=knitcitations

Reproducibility

sessionInfo()

## R version 3.0.2 (2013-09-25)
## Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)
## 
## locale:
## [1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
## 
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
## 
## other attached packages:
## [1] knitcitations_0.5-0 bibtex_0.3-6        knitr_1.5          
## 
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
##  [1] codetools_0.2-8 digest_0.6.4    evaluate_0.5.1  formatR_0.10   
##  [5] httr_0.2        RCurl_1.95-4.1  stringr_0.6.2   tools_3.0.2    
##  [9] XML_3.95-0.2    xtable_1.7-1

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