Customising your .Rprofile

I was scrolling through Twitter and saw this tweet from Danielle Navarro.

I was immediately captivated.

The standard R console welcome message is not cool at all, and I used to think it was inevitable until this tweet magically appeared on my timeline. Danielle linked the setup for her .Rprofile, which gave me some ideas for my own. The command usethis::edit_r_profile() opens the .Rprofile file in a new tab (RStudio) or in a text editor (when I tried on VS Code).

I went for a simple welcome message: the current R version, a quote from whatever thing is sticking in my head (it’s currently Space Jam related), today’s date and the current astrological sign ⭐

I also left Danielle’s command that shows the current branch name when I’m working on a version-controlled project.

if(interactive()) {
  
  cat("\014") # clear screen
  cli::cli_text("")
  cli::cli_text(paste0(R.version$version.string,
                       " - ",
                       R.version$nickname))
  cli::cli_text("")
  
  cli::cli_text(paste0("Come on and ",
                       cli::col_cyan("SLAM"),
                       ", and welcome to the ",
                       cli::col_yellow("JAM"),
                       "!"))
  cli::cli_text("")
  
  cli::cli_text(
    paste0(
      stringr::str_to_title(weekdays(Sys.Date()))," ",
      format(Sys.Date(), format="%d")," ",
      months(Sys.Date())," ",
      format(Sys.Date(), format="%Y"),
      " ~ it's ",
      DescTools::Zodiac(Sys.Date()),
      " season!"
    )
  )
  cli::cli_text("")
  
  # customise the prompt
  prompt::set_prompt(function(...){
    branch <- (purrr::safely(gert::git_branch))()
    if(is.null(branch$result)) return("> ")
    return(paste0("[", branch$result, "] > "))
  })
}

I made my changes, saved then restarted R (Ctrl + Shift + F10 because keyboard is queen). I noticed that emojis did not render correctly no matter what I tried, which is a bummer.

Here is how R greets me nowadays:

TIL

• No single apostrophe in YAML. No likey.
• But rather, double apostrophe. Works.