Skip to contents

flighttools

flighttools is a personal package for Robert M Flight, with some functions that I find myself needing regularly. Nothing in it is meant to be required for an analysis, so that this package doesn’t need to be installed for something to run. Instead, most of the functions are helpers, either providing interactive functionality, or providing code that I can paste somewhere else to do something.

If you like the functions and want to use them as is, go ahead and install the package. I actually recommend that you fork this package, or look over the code and borrow what you want to make your own. Everything is MIT licensed, so go for it.

Installation

You can install the development version of flighttools from GitHub with:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("rmflight/flighttools")

Notifiers

The functions I use the most are probably the notification functions. There are three, for slightly different use cases, but they all work roughly the same way:

library(flighttools)
ft_*_success_error(code_to_evaluate)
  • ft_beep_success_error: plays a sound from beepr if code is successful, a different one if there is an error;
  • ft_notify_success_error: creates a visual notification using notify-send on linux;
  • ft_ntfy_success_error: sends a network notification using the ntfy package.

I typically use these when I am running a long function, or when I am running targets pipelines. What is really nice, is they take whatever R code you supply, evaluate it, and then check if the code errored. If it didn’t error, it just returns the results. If it errored, it tells you, by changing the notification, and then returns the results.

ft_beep_success_error(tar_make())
ft_beep_success_error(tar_make(valid_target_name))

Markdown Code Helpers

Many functions just spit code into the terminal for me to copy into a document or code file. For example, I have a title block I use regularly. It’s not enough for me to have a template, but I do like to use a consistent one. This way, I can have this package installed, but not as a hard dependency, and just copy the output into a project Rmd or qmd file.

title: "A Good Title"
author: "Robert M Flight"
date: last-modified
date-format: YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm
format: 
  docx:
    keep-md: true
  html:
    toc: true
    embed-resources: true
bibliography: bibliography_file.json

Graphics Code Helpers

Do you remember the code to turn axis labels 90 degrees in a ggplot2 graph? Me neither. But this gives me the code to add to a plot.

## scale_x_discrete(guide = guide_axis(angle = 90))
## 
## theme(axis.text.x=element_text(angle = 90)
## 
## coord_flip()

File Manipulation

When I’m using targets, I also like to be able to rename file outputs with the current date, so I can keep track of versions, as well as zip the Word figure directory up to share with others.

ft_rename_outputs(tar_read(file_output), prefix = "initials_info")
ft_zip_directory("docs/file_output/figure-docx", "docs/file_output_figures.zip")

Timekeeping

I work in an academic environment, and I do a lot of data analysis for collaborators. We really want to provide information on roughly how much time I spend on various tasks working with them, but I don’t want to manually track it. Therefore, I built a set of relatively simple time tracking functions into this package.

The way it works, is you set up a file where the timekeeping is recorded via start and stop statements. The file path is defined in an environment variable. I set this in the top level .Renviron. See ft_setup_timekeeping(). You also set which categories of tasks you are allowed to record in another environment variable, so that you restrict yourself to what categories you are recording, because personally, I’ll keep changing them.

Actual timekeeping log entries are comma separated, so don’t use comma’s in your comments, or anything else.

The functions are: