formatting.RmdIf you have to read someone else’s code, and we do all the time, then it helps if that code looks familiar. The spacing and use of symbols (= vs <-) is one kind of unfamiliarity that challenges our ability to understand what code does.
R has a package called Styler that formats code nicely. That package contains a function called styler::style_file(filename) that will reformat whole files. It won’t work to ask yourself to remember to run this command. You have to automate it, and there are three ways to do this.
You can use Styler as a last-minute check, before you commit code, that it currently obeys style guidelines. If the code doesn’t obey them, git will refuse to commit. You do this by creating a pre-commit hook in Git. That hook would call styler::transform_files(files, dry = "on") and check the returned data frame.
You could, instead, ask Styler to automatically modify files before they are committed. It doesn’t seem to break anything when it reformats. In this case, you’d add a similar pre-commit hook, but it would call styler::style_file(filename) on each changed file.
It’s less work for each researcher if you can ask the git server to do the checks for you. You can find examples of this for github, using Github Actions, but I don’t know how to do it on IHME’s servers. Mike Richards recommends a complete option, to run this before committing files: R -e “styler::style_pkg(‘.’)” That will reformat every file.