The problem

Lately, there has been some well-deserved buzz around addins in RStudio, datapasta being one and hrbraddins being another highly liked one.

I find datapasta helpful for creating little tibbles for teaching. I'll find some interesting data online and just copy and paste the table directly into the correct format. You can also set up keyboard shortcuts, because who doesn't love a keyboard shortcut. Thanks @MilesMcBain pic.twitter.com/deaZVVYYDu
— We are R-Ladies (@WeAreRLadies) July 22, 2019

My keyboard shortcut for this lil' function gets quite the workout…
📺 "hrbraddins::bare_combine()" by @hrbrmstr https://t.co/8dwqNEso0B #rstats pic.twitter.com/gyqz2mUE0Y
— Mara Averick (@dataandme) July 29, 2019

All of this is done with RStudio Addins using the rstudioapi r package.

A lot of the popular addins follows the same simple formula

extract highlighted text
modify extracted text
replace highlighted text with modified text.

if your problem can be solved with the above steps, then this post is for you.

The solution

Once you have found the name of your addin, go to your package directory, or create a new package. Then we use usethis to create a .R file for the function and to create the necessary infrastructure to let RStudio know it is a Addin.

use_r("name_of_your_addin")
use_addin("name_of_your_addin")

The inst/rstudio/addins.dcf file will be populated to make a binding between your function to the addins menu. From here you will in Name to change the text of the button in the drop-down menu and change the description to change the hover text.

Name: New Addin Name
Description: New Addin Description
Binding: name_of_your_addin
Interactive: false

now you can go back to the .R to write your function. Below is the minimal code needed. Just replace any_function with a function that takes a string and returns a modified string. build the package and you are done!

example <- function() {
  
  # Gets The active Documeent
  ctx <- rstudioapi::getActiveDocumentContext()

  # Checks that a document is active
  if (!is.null(ctx)) {
    
    # Extracts selection as a string
    selected_text <- ctx$selection[[1]]$text

    # modify string
    selected_text <- any_function(selected_text)
    
    # replaces selection with string
    rstudioapi::modifyRange(ctx$selection[[1]]$range, selected_text)
  }
}

Examples - slugify

While I was writing this post I created an addin to turn the title of the blog post into a slug I could use. I replaced

selected_text <- any_function(selected_text)

with

selected_text <- stringr::str_to_lower(selected_text)
selected_text <- stringr::str_replace_all(selected_text, " ", "-")

Which gave me this little gem of an addin!

session information


─ Session info ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 setting  value                       
 version  R version 4.1.0 (2021-05-18)
 os       macOS Big Sur 10.16         
 system   x86_64, darwin17.0          
 ui       X11                         
 language (EN)                        
 collate  en_US.UTF-8                 
 ctype    en_US.UTF-8                 
 tz       America/Los_Angeles         
 date     2021-07-15                  

─ Packages ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 package     * version date       lib source                           
 blogdown      1.3.2   2021-06-09 [1] Github (rstudio/blogdown@00a2090)
 bookdown      0.22    2021-04-22 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 bslib         0.2.5.1 2021-05-18 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 cli           3.0.0   2021-06-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 clipr         0.7.1   2020-10-08 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 codetools     0.2-18  2020-11-04 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 crayon        1.4.1   2021-02-08 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 desc          1.3.0   2021-03-05 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 details     * 0.2.1   2020-01-12 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 digest        0.6.27  2020-10-24 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 evaluate      0.14    2019-05-28 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 htmltools     0.5.1.1 2021-01-22 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 httr          1.4.2   2020-07-20 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 jquerylib     0.1.4   2021-04-26 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 jsonlite      1.7.2   2020-12-09 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 knitr       * 1.33    2021-04-24 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 magrittr      2.0.1   2020-11-17 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 png           0.1-7   2013-12-03 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 R6            2.5.0   2020-10-28 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 rlang         0.4.11  2021-04-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 rmarkdown     2.9     2021-06-15 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 rprojroot     2.0.2   2020-11-15 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 sass          0.4.0   2021-05-12 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 sessioninfo   1.1.1   2018-11-05 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 stringi       1.6.2   2021-05-17 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 stringr       1.4.0   2019-02-10 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 withr         2.4.2   2021-04-18 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 xfun          0.24    2021-06-15 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 xml2          1.3.2   2020-04-23 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   
 yaml          2.2.1   2020-02-01 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)                   

[1] /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.1/Resources/library