Question

I have a few colors (rgb/hex codes) that I would like to be available as defaults. I would like for the colors to be available on startup, without having to run any scripts. In other words, I would like to run the command colors() and have my custom colors show up in the list.

I suspect this list is populated from some file in the R tree, or from some other config file somewhere else. Specifically:

• What file does R pull the color definitions from?

Relevant data:

> version
               _                            
platform       x86_64-apple-darwin9.8.0     
arch           x86_64                       
os             darwin9.8.0                  
system         x86_64, darwin9.8.0          
status                                      
major          2                            
minor          15.1                         
year           2012                         
month          06                           
day            22                           
svn rev        59600                        
language       R                            
version.string R version 2.15.1 (2012-06-22)
nickname       Roasted Marshmallows

Answer 1

You can (if you really want), change the default palette to your own colours. For example,

(palette(c("yellow", "orange")))
plot(1:10, col=1:10)

Rather than providing named colours, you could also specify rgb colours using the rgb function. You can add this command to your .Rprofile so it’s available on start-up.

However, a better idea would be to define your own palette:

#Put this in your .Rprofile
mycols = adjustcolor(palette(), alpha.f = 0.3)
palette(mycols)

That way you don’t over-ride the default. See ?palette for other examples.