Colors in R console

Update 2: The colorout package has moved again and is now available on GitHub.

install.packages('devtools')
library(devtools)

install_github('jalvesaq/colorout')

Update: The colorout package on CRAN has not been updated to be compatible with R version 3.x.x yet. However, if you compile and install it yourself, it still works.

download.file("http://www.lepem.ufc.br/jaa/colorout_1.0-1.tar.gz", destfile = "colorout_1.0-1.tar.gz")
install.packages("colorout_1.0-1.tar.gz", type = "source", repos = NULL)

 R console

Let's face it, the R-console is one of the more uninviting things I have seen, perhaps second only to the Ocaml console which comes without readline.

This is what my (and probably your) R console looks like this:

R console without color

What I see on the console is a single color which, firstly, makes it a challenge to separate stderr, output, warnings and errors, and, secondly, is just boring. I did not know what I could do about it and I stuck with it because the only other option seemed to be moving to a GUI (JGR or Rstudio). This is not to say that there is something wrong with the GUIs, but I prefer working with only my keyboard and, hence, shun GUIs almost as a rule. (Eclipse for Java is an exception.)

But it changed when I discovered the package colorout on CRAN, which makes my console look like this:

R console with color (using colorout)

This makes it remarkably easier to differentiate different forms of output.
The coloring is not perfect (notice that the second '-' in the interval outputted for tmp30 is assumed to be a negative sign instead of being a separator), but I would choose it any given day over the drab single color.
I did need a little tweak to my .Rprofile file since I did not like the way the default settings display the error:

	# Copy this to your .Rprofile
	library('colorout')
	setOutputColors256(
	normal = 40,
	number = 214,
	string = 85,
	const = 35,
	stderror = 45,
	error = c(1, 0, 1),
	warn = c(1, 0, 100)
	)

view raw gistfile1.r hosted with ❤ by GitHub

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musically_ut