hexsession

Lifecycle: experimental CRAN status

The goal of hexsession is to create a tile of hexagonal logos for packages installed on your machine. Tiles can be created for a set of packages specified with a character vector, or for the loaded packages in your session (all packages attached to the search path except for base packages). Also supports vectors with paths to local images.

Installation

Install the development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("luisdva/hexsession")

Using hexsession

With hexsession installed, we can create a self-contained HTML file with tiled hex logos for all loaded packages in a session. If a package does not have a logo bundled in man/figures/, if the logos are added to .Rbuildignore, or if the image cannot be found easily, a generic-looking logo with the package name will be generated.

For a given session with libraries loaded in addition to base packages:


# custom set of packages
hexsession::make_tile(packages=c("terra","sf","tidyr"))

The make_tile() function generates a self-contained HTML file and writes it to a temp_hexsession/ subfolder inside tempdir() by default. The function returns the path to the HTML file and prints it as a message, so you always know where to find it. To write the output to your project directory instead, pass output_dir = getwd() (or any other path).

For a session with the following packages loaded:

library(annotater)
library(ggforce)
library(purrr)
library(forcats)
library(unheadr)
library(sdmTMB)
library(parsnip)
library(DBI)
library(broom)
library(vctrs)
library(patchwork)


hexsession::make_tile()

The output would look like this:

Once downloaded to your machine and opened in a browser, the hexout_example.html shows the interactive, responsive HTML version with cool hover effects that adapts to the size of the browser window and includes hyperlinks to each package website.

To save a static version of the hex tile, we call snap_tile() with a path to the output image and optionally, height and width values to change the viewport size.

The result:

Highlight mode

Set highlight_mode to TRUE if you want a tile in which all images are dimmed except the one being hovered over, to emphasize individual packages interactively:

hexsession::make_tile(highlight_mode = TRUE)

Focus

When making tiles for a vector of package names, use focus to specify packages one or more packages that will be highlighted by dimming all the other images in the tile.

Dark mode

To draw the tiles on a dark background, set dark_mode to TRUE when creating or capturing your hex logos.

hexsession::make_tile(dark_mode = TRUE)
hexsession::snap_tile("test.png",dark_mode = TRUE)

User-provided images and urls

make_tile can now take vectors of additional images and their respective but optional urls to include in the hex grid.

make_tile(packages = c("tidyterra", "sf"), 
          local_images = c("path/to/your/image1.png", 
                           "path/to/your/image2.png",
          local_urls = c("https://an-example.web",  "https://another-example.com"))

Notes

This package depends on working installations of magick and chromote, and thus requires a Chromium-based web browser (e.g., Chrome, Chromium, Opera, or Vivaldi) for snap_tile().

hexsession is very much work in progress and highly experimental. I am still learning good-practices for packages that create files and directories, use system commands, and launch browser sessions.

All feedback is welcome in any form (issues, pull requests, etc.)

Credit and LLM disclosure statement