[R] .Rprofile, date tagging history, loading packages

[Duncan Murdoch]

Muenchen, Robert A (Bob) wrote:
> Dear R-Helpers,
>
> I'm fiddling with my .Rprofile in Windows XP & R 2.7.0 Beta. I prefer to
> manually save my workspace but automatically save my command history via
> the .Rprofile. That is working fine once I found that "utils::" was
> required before the loadhistory & savehistory functions. What I would
> like to do is add a separator line with a date between the histories of
> each session. Something like,
>
> =====History for Sun Apr 13 09:43:50 2008
>
> Is this possible? I have it print the date at startup, but that doesn't
> appear as part of the history.
>   

See ?timestamp.  I think it does what you want.

I don't know the relative merits of the two methods below; I suspect 
they're all pretty much equivalent (but watch out for things like search 
order, and which functions are available at which time.)

Duncan Murdoch
> Also, I'm loading two packages at startup, which is working fine with
> this code:
>
> local({
>    myOriginal <- getOption("defaultPackages")
>    myAutoLoads <- c("Hmisc","ggplot2")
>    myBoth <- c(myOriginal,myAutoLoads)
>    options(defaultPackages = myBoth)
>  })
>
> But when reading AITR, I noticed it has a .Rprofile example that looks
> much simpler. It just loads the one additional package without checking
> the defaultPackages. Is this just as good? Does it even need to be in
> the .First function definition, or could it simply be a command by
> itself in .Rprofile?
>
> .First <- function() {
> options(prompt="$ ", continue="+\t") # $ is the prompt
> options(digits=5, length=999) # custom numbers and printout
> x11() # for graphics
> par(pch = "+") # plotting character
> source(file.path(Sys.getenv("HOME"), "R", "mystuff.R"))
> # my personal functions
> library(MASS) # attach a package
> }
>
> Thanks,
> Bob
>
> My whole .Rprofile:
>
> #     Startup Settings
>
> # Place any R commands below.
>
> options(width=64, digits=5, show.signif.stars=TRUE)
> set.seed(1234)
> setwd("/myRfolder")
> myPackages <- c("car","foreign","hexbin",
>   "ggplot2","gmodels","gplots", "Hmisc",
>   "lattice", "reshape","ggplot2","Rcmdr")
> utils::loadhistory(file = "myCumulative.Rhistory")
>
>
> # Load packages automatically below.
>
>  local({
>    myOriginal <- getOption("defaultPackages")
>
>    # Edit next line to include your favorites.
>    myAutoLoads <- c("Hmisc","ggplot2")
>    myBoth <- c(myOriginal,myAutoLoads)
>    options(defaultPackages = myBoth)
>  })
>
> # Things put here are done first.
> .First <- function() 
>   {
>     cat("\n   Welcome to R!")
>     cat("\n  " , paste(date()), "\n\n" )
>   }
>
>
> # Things put here are done last.
> .Last <- function() 
>   {
>     graphics.off()
>     cat("\n\n  myCumulative.Rhistory has been saved on " ,paste(date())
> ) 
>     cat("\n\n  Goodbye!\n\n") 
>     utils::savehistory(file="myCumulative.Rhistory")
>   }
>
> =========================================================
> Bob Muenchen (pronounced Min'-chen), Manager 
> Statistical Consulting Center
> U of TN Office of Information Technology
> 200 Stokely Management Center, Knoxville, TN 37996-0520
> Voice: (865) 974-5230 
> FAX: (865) 974-4810
> Email: muenchen at utk.edu
> Web: http://oit.utk.edu/scc, 
> News: http://listserv.utk.edu/archives/statnews.html
> =========================================================
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>