Some R Packages to Keep In Mind

notes
R
Productivity
Author

Andy

Published

December 15, 2020

./assets/body-header.qmd

I have written several notes to myself over the years as reminders. These include ideas for research, R packages I have seen and may use sometime), things to-do, etc. I am in the process of making some of these notes more public on my blog. This will act as a more searchable, curated “note” for myself, but also makes it available to anyone else who would benefit.

R Packages for Productivity

  • blastula is a package for creating beautiful custom emails in R. It can be used to compose custom email bodies based on code, code output, and markdown; and send emails using SMTP servers - even GMail - or integrate with production services like RStudio Connect. Also available from CRAN.


Packages to Enhance Markdown Documents

  • bookdown facilitates writing books and long-form articles/reports with R Markdown. There are several examples of books writte in bookdown and documentation available at https://bookdown.org/.
  • citr creates an RStudio addin to insert citations in an R Markdown document.
  • emo can be used to easily add emoji into an R Markdown document.
  • equatiomatic extracts output from the lm() function to write the equation using LaTeX.
  • markdowntemplates includes a set of R markdown templates and knitr knit engine replacements.
  • papaja can be used to easily prepare APA journal articles with R Markdown.
  • vitae makes creating and maintaining a Resume or CV with R Markdown simple. It provides a collection of LaTeX templates, with helpful functions to add content to the documents.
  • xaringan can be used to produce some slick slideshows with remark.js using R Markdown.
    • xaringanExtra is a “playground of enhancements and extensions for xaringan slides”. This package also includes functions for sharing your slides on a website or Twitter.
    • xaringanthemer adds some style to you xaringan produced slides.


Packages to Enhance Plots

  • colorblindr can simulate colorblindness in production-ready R figures.
  • emoGG can be used to add emoji into your ggplots.
  • extrafont makes it easier to include system fonts in your plots. Also available from CRAN.
  • ggrough converts your ggplot2 plots to rough/sketchy charts, using the excellent javascript roughjs library.


Packages for Creating Tables

  • gt creates “wonderful-looking tables using the R programming language. The gt philosophy: we can construct a wide variety of useful tables with a cohesive set of table parts. These include the table header, the stub, the column labels and spanner column labels, the table body, and the table footer.”
  • kableExtra includes functionality to enhance kable() tables. There is extensive documentation for producing tables in HTML and LaTeX.
  • modelsummary creates “tables and plots to summarize statistical models and data”. These tables are also customizable.
  • stargazer can be used to create tables of regression model output.
  • stargazer-booktabs is a slightly modified version of the stargazer package which outputs tables using the booktabs (LaTeX) commands (\toprule, \midrule, and \bottomrule) to include horizontal rules.


Fun R Packages

Fun package art
  • cowsay creates a message accompanied by ASCII animal art. Also available from CRAN.
  • dadjoke produces dad jokes with the groan() function.
  • emokid outputs some emo messages when “you’re having trouble expressing how you feel about your broken code.”
  • fortunes includes a collection of fortunes and wisdom from the R community. Available from CRAN.
  • fun allows you to play minesweeper in R, among other things. Also available from CRAN.
  • Play Zork in R This blog post gives some code to load infocom games via Frotz and play them in the R console.