paint

An artisanally crafted set of print methods for data.frame family rectangles:

• data.frame
• tibble (tbl_df)
• simple features geometry collection (sf)
• data.table
• tsibble (tbl_ts)

Installation

Get the latest release from my r-universe:

install.packages(
   "paint", 
   repos = c(mm = "https://milesmcbain.r-universe.dev", getOption("repos")))

Usage

paint()

Call paint() on any compatible data.frame. Relevant metadata is printed for each class.

library(spData)
library(paint)
paint(nz)
#> sf [16, 7]
#> active geometry column: geom (MULTIPOLYGON)
#> crs: 2193 (NZGD2000 / New Zealand Transverse Mercator 2000)
#> crs unit: metre
#> Name          chr Northland Auckland Waikato Bay of Plenty ~
#> Island        chr North North North North North North
#> Land_area     dbl 12500.561149 4941.572557 23900.036383 120~
#> Population    dbl 175500 1657200 460100 299900 48500 164000
#> Median_income int 23400 29600 27900 26200 24400 26100
#> Sex_ratio     dbl 0.942453 0.944286 0.95205 0.928039 0.9349~
#> geom          sfc MPOLY 1,784B MPOLY 2,288B MPOLY 2,376B MP~

Replacing print()

You can choose replace the print() methods with paint() to paint datafames any time they are output:

paint::mask_print()
#> {paint} masked print.data.frame
#> {paint} masked print.tbl_df
#> {paint} masked print.sf
library(tibble)
library(sf)
#> Linking to GEOS 3.10.1, GDAL 3.4.0, PROJ 8.2.0; sf_use_s2() is TRUE
library(spData)
coffee_data
#> tibble [47, 3]
#> name_long              chr Angola Bolivia Brazil Burundi Ca~
#> coffee_production_2016 int NA 3 3277 37 8 NA
#> coffee_production_2017 int NA 4 2786 38 6 NA

paint::mask_print() can be placed in the .Rprofile so paint() is always preferred. unmask_print() will return the print() methods to their defaults for the current session.

By default a reminder message is posted when S3 methods are masked. Disable this with options(paint_remind_mask_print = FALSE).

unpaint()

While using paint() as your default print(), you can call the original print() method with unpaint():

library(paint)
unpaint(nz)
#> Simple feature collection with 16 features and 6 fields
#> Geometry type: MULTIPOLYGON
#> Dimension:     XY
#> Bounding box:  xmin: 1090144 ymin: 4748537 xmax: 2089533 ymax: 6191874
#> Projected CRS: NZGD2000 / New Zealand Transverse Mercator 2000
#> First 10 features:
#>                 Name Island Land_area Population Median_income Sex_ratio
#> 1          Northland  North 12500.561     175500         23400 0.9424532
#> 2           Auckland  North  4941.573    1657200         29600 0.9442858
#> 3            Waikato  North 23900.036     460100         27900 0.9520500
#> 4      Bay of Plenty  North 12071.145     299900         26200 0.9280391
#> 5           Gisborne  North  8385.827      48500         24400 0.9349734
#> 6        Hawke's Bay  North 14137.524     164000         26100 0.9238375
#> 7           Taranaki  North  7254.480     118000         29100 0.9569363
#> 8  Manawatu-Wanganui  North 22220.608     234500         25000 0.9387734
#> 9         Wellington  North  8048.553     513900         32700 0.9335524
#> 10        West Coast  South 23245.456      32400         26900 1.0139072
#>                              geom
#> 1  MULTIPOLYGON (((1745493 600...
#> 2  MULTIPOLYGON (((1803822 590...
#> 3  MULTIPOLYGON (((1860345 585...
#> 4  MULTIPOLYGON (((2049387 583...
#> 5  MULTIPOLYGON (((2024489 567...
#> 6  MULTIPOLYGON (((2024489 567...
#> 7  MULTIPOLYGON (((1740438 571...
#> 8  MULTIPOLYGON (((1866732 566...
#> 9  MULTIPOLYGON (((1881590 548...
#> 10 MULTIPOLYGON (((1557042 531...

For convenience unpaint() it will call print() on .LastValue by default if no argument is provided.

Customising

Supported options:

• paint_palette the palette to paint row colours with, defaults to rainbow_6(), 6 standard ANSI colours that are supported in most terminals.
• paint_n_rows the number of rows to print for each column. Defaults to the number of colours in the paint_palette, but can be set higher for repeating sequences.
• paint_max_width the maximum width of the output. 60 is the default. {paint} does not resize based on terminal width by design.
• paint_align_row_head = c("left", "center", "right"). How to align the column title and type. Defaults to "left".
• paint_dark_mode darken the paint_palette using crayon::blurred - not supported in all terminals.
• paint_remind_mask_print show a reminder message when print() methods are manipulated by {paint}? defaults to TRUE.

Making a custom palette

There are a number of built in palettes - see ?paintpals. Creating your own palettes is matter of creating a list of {crayon} styles. These can be created from hex colour codes e.g. #8DD3C7. A bit easier than it sounds it practice:

library(viridisLite)
library(crayon)
my_magma <- lapply(viridisLite::magma(6), crayon::make_style)
options(paint_palette = my_magma)
paint(mtcars)
#> data.frame [32, 11]
#> mpg  dbl 21 21 22.8 21.4 18.7 18.1
#> cyl  dbl 6 6 4 6 8 6
#> disp dbl 160 160 108 258 360 225
#> hp   dbl 110 110 93 110 175 105
#> drat dbl 3.9 3.9 3.85 3.08 3.15 2.76
#> wt   dbl 2.62 2.875 2.32 3.215 3.44 3.46
#> qsec dbl 16.46 17.02 18.61 19.44 17.02 20.22
#> vs   dbl 0 0 1 1 0 1
#> am   dbl 1 1 1 0 0 0
#> gear dbl 4 4 4 3 3 3
#> carb dbl 4 4 1 1 2 1

Colours are applied to rows in the order they appear in the palette. You can also use more advanced {crayon} styles, but that is beyond the scope of this document.

Design

{paint} is a response to my frustrations with standard print methods on wide rectangles with long naming schemes. It tries to be less noisy, harnessing the eyes’ ability to see colour patterns to reduce markup characters. Only the most important information for data wrangling is highlighted, the pinnacle being the column names, which always appear down the left and are never truncated.

Important issues with the data, e.g. sticky dplyr groups, or missing values, are highlighted to draw extra attention.

{paint} draws inspiration from glimpse(), str(), {emphatic}, and the Rainbow CSV addin for VSCode.