Below are a dozen of very specific R tips and tricks. Some are valuable, useful, or boost your productivity. Others are just geeky funny. 

More general helpful R packages and resources can be found in this list.

If you have additions, please comment below or contact me!

Completely new to R? → Start here!

Table of Contents

• RStudio tricks
• General tips
• Base R tricks
• R Markdown tricks
• Data manipulation tricks
• Data visualization tricks

• Funny tricks
• Easter eggs

---

---

RStudio

• RStudio Addins
• RStudio Keyboard Shortcuts
• R Studio easy tricks: tearable panes, command history, renaming in scope, outlining, snippets, and more
• Working with R projects and here
• Working with code snippets
• Working with code snippets (video)
• Stop RStudio from asking to save workspace
• Automatically save workspace in case of a crash / errors
• Edit several lines of code at once
• Press ALT + left mousebutton to select and write on multiple lines simultaneously.
• Press ALT + - to insert a <- operator
• Press CTRL + SHIFT + M to insert a %>% operator
• Press CTRL + SHIFT + F to search all files in the directory or project
• Press CTRL + UP to access navigate your console history
• Rename all variables with same name (rename in scope)
• Press CMD + ALT + SHIFT + M to rename variable within scope: to rename all/multiple occurrences of a variable in a script
• Press TAB inside “” (quotation marks / an empty string) to select a filename from your current directory, or to autocomplete a filename you started typing

Many more shortkeys available here online, and in your RStudio under Tools → Keyboard Shortcuts Help.

General

• 6-step guide to learning R
• Change your default library location
• Copy any data straight into R objects with datapasta
• Copy excel data straight into R dataframes
• Read in observational data split over multiple rows
• Send documents to Google Drive using R
• Use corrr to simplify working with correlations
• Use prettycode to print highighted console output
• Five ways to standardize column names to snake_case format
• Make screenshots with magick::image_read('screenshot:')
• Make regular expression easy with the RVerbalExpression package

Disclaimer: This page contains one or more links to Amazon.
Any purchases made through those links provide us with a small commission that helps to host this blog.

Useful base functions

• str() – explore structure of R object
• trimws() – trim trailing and/or leading whitespaces
• dput() – dump an R object in form of R code
• cut()– categorize values into intervals
• intersect() – returns similar elements in two vectors
• union() – find intersecting items in two vectors
• setdiff() – returns different elements in two vectors
• interaction() – computes a factor which represents the interaction of the given factors
• formatC()can be used to round numbers and force trailing zero’s
• formatC() and sprintf() can be used to add leading/trailing characters
• expand.grid() – create a data frame from all combinations of the supplied vectors or factors
• seq_along(myvec) – generates a vector of 1:length(myvec)
• Initiate an empty dataframe with header names
• Functional programming tricks:
  • switch() can replace elaborate ifelse statements (see also)
  • match.arg() can check for arguments and values
  • The null-default operator (%||%) returns the first value that is not NULL
• Convert a vector of strings to title case
• Quickly map a new set of values to an existing vector
• Calculate the derivative of a function expression
• Specify options() in your script:
  • Prevent scientific notation using options(scipen = 999)
  • Prevent automatic factor columns using options(stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
  • Use options(width = 60) to change the default width of console output
  • Use options(max.print = 100) to change the default number of values printed in the console

Back to Table of Contents

R Markdown

• Pimp my RMD: Overview of many R markdown tricks by Yan Holtz
• Save compiled images in folder with markdown
• Add caption to compiled tables with markdown
• Tabsets in markdown
• Foldable html content in markdown
• Reuse code chunks in markdown
• Generate Word documents with markdown
• Open url’s in a new window with[text](url){target = "_blank} in markdown
• Use #<< to highlight code
• Move to next xaringan slide upon click (or Enter)
• Convert an R Markdown file (.Rmd) into an R script (.R) with 
  knitr::purl(input, output, documentation = 2)
• Use CTRL + SHIFT + 1:4 to zoom in on any single of your RStudio panels. Use ALT + CTRL + SHIFT + 0 to zoom back out.
• knitr::read_chunk("your_script_name.R") can be used to source in scripts that reside outside your current markdown file
• Use animations in your markdown files with the gganimate package and "header-includes: - \usepackage{animate} in your YAML preamble
• Create a searchable, sortable HTML table in 1 line of code with DT::datatable(mydf, filter = 'top')

Data manipulation

• readr::parse_number extracts the numbers from raw / scraped text
• stringr::str_pad can be used to add leading or trailing characters (like zero’s)
• dplyr tricks
• dplyr::case_when replaces elaborate ifelse statements (Video)
• dplyr::everything in combination with dplyr::select to reorder columns
• Quickly count / tally observations within groups with dplyr::count, dplyr::tally, and dplyr::add_count and dplyr::add_tally
• Quickly filter the top categories / groups based on a variable with forcats::fct_lump
• Apply the same filter to multiple columns with dplyr::filter_all or dplyr::filter_if in combination with dplyr::all_vars and dplyr::any_vars
• dplyr::group_by_if performs quick conditional grouping
• Perform rowwise mutations / calculations using dplyr::rowwise
• purrr tricks
• purrr::map_df to read in and merge all data files in a folder
• Combine purr::map_df and fs::dir_ls to read in and merge all data files following a specific pattern in a folder
• Combine list.files and  purrr::map_df to read in and merge all data files in a folder
• broom::tidy puts your model results in a tidy data frame
• Simpler correlation analysis with corrr
• df %>% .$column_name or df %$% column_name can retrieve a column from a tibble
• dplyr::coalesce finds the one value contained in many columns with missing values
• Display a fraction between 0 and 1 as a percentage with scales::percent(myfraction)
• Convert numbers that came in as strings with commas to R numbers with readr::parse_number(mydf$mycol)

Data visualization

• colors() to see the names of all built-in colors
• GGally::ggpairs for beautiful pair-wise correlation plots
• tidyr::complete to get barplot spacing right
• Quickly visualize your whole dataset
• Create custom, corporate, reproducible color palettes and custom discrete color scales
• Standardize the colors of groups in your visualizations using named vectors
• theme_set to set a default ggplot2 theme
• Create your own ggplot2 theme:
  • ggplot2 reference guide: Modify components of a theme
  • custom ggplot2 themes by Joey Stanley
  • How to create a ggplot2 Unicorn theme by Florian Teschner
  • 4.6 Building a New Theme – Mastering Software Development in R (Peng, Kross, & Anderson, 2017)
  • Labelling visuals using a custom theme by Michael Kearney
• Rearranging values and axis within ggplot2 facets
• Add line labels at the end of geom_lines by Simon Jackson
• Add + NULL to the end of your ggplot2 chain during development
• Add clip = "off" to draw outside the plot panel
• Remove point borders with stroke = 0
• Multicolored annotated text in ggplot2 by Andrew Whitby & Visuelle Data
• Combine plots using patchwork or cowplot
• Add a (corporate) logo to your plot using magick
• Use animations in your markdown files with the gganimate package and "header-includes: - \usepackage{animate} in your YAML preamble
• If you pass a function to the data-argument in a geom_*, then it applies that function to the data!
• Generate distributions in ggplot2 using the stat_function function. Normal distributions, student t-distributions, beta distributions, anything. See also here.

Back to Table of Contents

Fun

• Nonogram puzzles
• Star Wars animation
• Snow animation
• Jingle Bells tune
• Base R Christmas tree plot
• Star Wars tune
• Draw Star Wars Droid BB-8
• Animated personalized motivational GIF
• Animated grey color gradient illusion
• Animated sprites
• Animated fireworks
• Valentine’s day base R heart by Pranav Pandya
• Valentine’s day heart in ggplot2 by David Robinson
• Valentine’s day heart v2 in ggplot2 by JonTheGeek
• Valentine’s day heart in gganimate (old API) by David Robinson
• Valentine’s day heart in gganimate (updated API) by Oscar de Léon
• Valentine’s day multiple hearts in gganimate (old API) by David Kretch
• Draw a bunny with install.packages("onion"); require(onion); data(bunny); p3d(bunny,theta=3,phi=104,box=FALSE), via R-bloggers
• “Distracted Boyfriend” meme in ggplot2
• Pixelated Halloween Jack-o-Lantern
• Lightning bolt Harry Potter style
• Random mandelbrot-like visuals (tidyverse-edition without loop)
• Brownian Bridge Animation 1: Minimal Paths
• Brownian Bridge Animation 4: The Shrieking Eels
• Generate generative art with R
• Generate a red sticker
• Generate a lightbulb style thingy
• Generate a weird wing-thingy
• Generate (tweetable) mathematical art
• Generate crochet patterns
• Generate Perlin noise
• Generate Julia Set flowers
• Mathematical art
• Use ggtextures to make your own ggplot::geom_* such as ggbarf::geom_barf
• Call forking GIFS into your RStudio session with bortels::fork function
• Coloring image for object of type closure is not subsettable

Easter eggs

• Run ????"", via Reddit
• Run example(readLine), via DecisionStats
• Run ?.Internal, via DecisionStats

Back to Table of Contents