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I recently announced the rmote package for serving various graphics from an interactive remote R session to a local machine. I have made a few noteworthy upates to the package, so here’s a quick post about them. The most major update is an enhanced plot history navigator in the viewer, which you can see in action below.
< !--more-->The current version is 0.3.4. To get the latest update, do
install.packages("rmote", repos = c(CRAN = "http://cran.rstudio.com", tessera = "http://packages.tessera.io"))
or alternatively
devtools::install_github(c("yihui/servr", "hafen/rmote"))
History navigation
I have updated the rmote viewer to provide better navigation of the output history. This is best described by watching the screen capture below.
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Adding this feature required several updates, including creating thumbnail methods for each output type and updating the viewer to have a collapsible history sidebar.
A couple of useful keyboard shortcuts to note for the viewer:
- up/down/left/right arrows navigate the history
- ‘h’ will show / hide the history sidebar
The viewer is compact, written in about 150 lines of html/css/javascript with no dependencies.
If you don’t want thumbnails and history navigation (beyond simple iteration through plots with prev/next), you can initialize your rmote server with history = FALSE
.
Base R graphics support
I have added support for base R graphics. This works a bit differently from the other graphics outputs because all of the other outputs are objects with a print method that is called once. Base R graphics, on the other hand, have a device instantiated at the first plot command, and then are built upon with subsequent plot commands. Because of this, rmote needs to know when you are done with your base R plot and want it served. To accomodate this, you can call plot_done()
to let rmote know that it is time to send the plot.
For example:
plot(1:10) abline(0, 1) plot_done()
See the screen capture above to see this in action.
One might argue that a new plot should be served after every indiviual base R plot command, which I think should technically be possible, but would be one more intrusion into R internals.
Note that you can turn on or off support for base graphics or other graphics types by setting the appropriate flag in the call to start_rmote()
(e.g. basegraphics = FALSE
).
Other updates
- Fixed an issue such that if you have your own graphics devices open, rmote will not interfere with them.
- Fixed an issue with the live reloading (thanks to Yihui Xie for accomodating this) so that the index reliably updates each time a new plot is made.
- The viewer web page now shows the name of the remote in the title (useful for multiple remotes) which can be turned off by setting
hostname = FALSE
instart_rmote()
.
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