alamak catches your errors and lets a Pixel Pal (patent pending) tell you all about it.

The name comes from the Singlish/Malay expression "alamak!", which is an exclamation that follows a surprising/unsettling event, or a minor nuisance, according to the vibe.

As usual, install throught devtools:

devtools::install_github("gdagstn/alamak")

You may think that in order to use alamak you need to know how to code. The opposite is true: not knowing how to code will let alamak shine in all its glory.

Wrap your call into a call to alamak(). If a warning or an error occurs, a Pixel Pal (patent pending) appears on the screen and tells you what they think about you and your situation.

library(alamak)
alamak(your_function(), pixelpal = "Jerry")

Alternatively, and if you are using R 4.0 and above, you can use the |> (pipe) operator (or the %>% magrittr pipe for versions below). Note that sometimes the function call on the left has to be enclosed in parentheses to work:

sum(a, 3) |> alamak(pixpal = "Lenny")
sum(a, 3) %>% alamak(pixpal = "Oniji")

# This also works but needs parentheses
(a + 3) |> alamak(pixpal = "Buster")

alamak() displays compressed Pixel Pals by default. Compression saves space, but in some terminals it does not work well. You can disable it by adding compress = FALSE to the alamak() arguments.

The Rstudio console default theme (TextMate) has a line height that doesn't render "pixels" properly. To fix this you can edit the .rstheme file by adding this element:

#rstudio_console_output {
    line-height: 1.2 !important;
}

alamak is quite dumb and should not be used in professional settings, unless that's your thing.

There are 5 Pixel Pals (patent pending) available:

Jerry, a parrot who doesn't like you very much:

Buster, a cool lemon:

Lenny, a supportive velociraptor who is also great with kids:

Oniji, an 18th century Japanese kabuki actor who only speaks in haiku:

E10N, a no-nonsense robot from the not so distant future

You can create another Pixel Pal (patent pending) yourself! If you have a 16x16 (can be bigger but may distort the text on the screen) PNG file with transparency you can load it. As a reference, consider that every "pixel" is actually two whitespaces with a colored background, so a 32x32 picture will take up 64 spaces in size in the terminal.

You only need to make a list with the following elements:

• crayon: the result of a call to makePixelPal() where the argument is the path to a PNG file
• messages: a nested list containing two other lists:
  • Error: a character vector of error messages
  • Warning: a character vector of warning messages

You can choose whether you want the Pixel Pal to be compressed or not.

new_pixelpal = list("crayon" = makePixPal("path/to/picture.png", compress = TRUE),
                    "messages" = list(
                    "Error" = c("The first possible message", 
                                "The second possible message", 
                                "And so on", 
                                "You know the drill"),
                     "Warning" = c("A warning message",
                                   "Another warning message")
                                  )
                        )

then use it with alamak

alamak(your_function(), new_pixelpal)

• Gábor Csárdi for the crayon package
• Simon Urbanek for the png package
• Trevor L. Davis for suggestions on compression using Unicode Blocks