Overview
The knitractive package provides a knitr engine that allows you to simulate interactive sessions (e.g., Python console, Bash shell) across multiple code chunks. Interactive sessions are run inside a tmux session through the tmuxr and rexpect packages.
Everybody can knit with knitractive
R Markdown files combine text and code to produce, using a process called knitting, dynamic documents such as reports, presentations, websites, and even books. Unlike the name suggests, R Markdown isn’t just for useRs, but also for Pythonistas, Rubyists, Perl Monks, Lispers, and basically everybody who enjoys a good REPL. There’s just one issue: only code chunks written in R–and since recently Python—are evaluated in a persistent environment; code chucks in any other language are evaluated separately.
The knitractive package solves this issue by providing a knitr engine that allows you to simulate interactive sessions (e.g., Jupyter console, Bash shell, Postgres CLI) across multiple code chunks. Interactive sessions are run inside a tmux session (optionally via a Docker container) through the tmuxr package.
I initially developed knitractive along with tmuxr and rexpect in order to make my book Data Science at the Command Line available online, in the same way as Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund’s R for Data Science. Now that these packages are open source, I hope that they’ll enable others to create beautiful R Markdown documents with their favorite programming language or REPL.
Installation
You can install knitractive from GitHub with:
# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("jeroenjanssens/knitractive")