swissValet • swissValet

Title: Interactive Functions to be Used as Shortcuts in RStudio
License: GPL (≥ 2)

🧩 Overview

swissValet turns the inspection functions you type dozens of times a day into single keystrokes. Each addin takes the current selection in the RStudio editor, wraps it in the corresponding call and executes it immediately in the console.

Select mtcars, press your shortcut, and str(mtcars) runs — no copying, no typing, no losing the selection.

The package further contains interactive dialogs for selecting variables and sorting code elements, converters between Unicode characters and escape sequences, and a routine that writes an existing object back into the editor as reproducible source code.

📖 Repository: https://github.com/AndriSignorell/swissValet/

⚙️ Installation

install.packages("swissValet")

Or the development version from GitHub:

remotes::install_github("AndriSignorell/swissValet")

⌨️ Setting up shortcuts

In RStudio: Tools → Modify Keyboard Shortcuts…, filter for the addin name, and assign a key combination. A layout that keeps the fingers in one place works well, for example Ctrl+Alt+S for xStrX, Ctrl+Alt+H for xHead, Ctrl+Alt+P for xPlot.

📚 Core Features

🔹 Inspection Addins

Each applies its function to the current editor selection:

Addin	Runs
`xStrX()`	`strX()` — structure of the object
`xSummary()`	`summary()`
`xHead()`	`head()`
`xDesc()`	`desc()`
`xAbstract()`	`abstract()`
`xExample()`	`example()`
`xPlot()`	`plot()`
`xUnclass()`	`unclass()`
`xxlView()`	`xlView()` — open in Excel

🔹 Interactive Dialogs

selectVarDialog() — pick elements, factor levels or data frame columns from a list and get the corresponding R expression, copied to the clipboard
.orderSelectionDlg() — choose ascending, descending or random ordering for selected code elements

🔹 Editor Utilities

flushToSource() — write the selected object back into the document as reproducible code; data frames become a readable data.frame(...) call rather than dput() output
toggleUnicodeAddin() — convert the selection between Unicode characters and escape sequences

🔹 Helpers

some() — a random subset of a vector, matrix or data frame, the counterpart to head() and tail()
escapeUnicode(), unescapeUnicode()

🧪 Example

library(swissValet)

# a random subset instead of the first rows
some(mtcars, 5)
some(letters, 10)

# n relative to the object size
some(1:20, -5)

# Unicode round trip
escapeUnicode("Schneehöhe")
unescapeUnicode("Schneeh\\u00f6he")

🧱 The Suite

swissValet uses bedrock, pharos, DescToolsX and pons for the functions its addins call.

🙏 Acknowledgements

Parts of the code and documentation were reviewed with the help of large language models (OpenAI Codex, Anthropic Claude). Every suggestion was assessed, edited and verified by the maintainer, who remains solely responsible for the content of this package.

📜 License

GPL (≥ 2)

📦 swissValet