Question

I have a very long script R that plots very complicated data. I only use the plots to have a visual idea of what I am doing but I can compute the results without the plots and obviously not plotting anything makes things much faster. Occasionally, however, I still need to visualize what the program does to keep debugging it.

To achieve this plotting ‘on or off’ switch I am following this strategy.

For each line that has commands relevant to the plotting functions of the script, I have a specific commented tag #toplot at the end of each relevant line. Using the power of regex substitution I then comment / uncomment these lines with the following commands.

The sample code:

a <- c(1:10)
b <- a/sin(a)
png('sin.png') #toplot
plot(b)        #toplot
dev.off()      #toplot
print(b)

To comment the ‘tagged’ lines:

  :%s/.\+#toplot/###commline###\0/g

I get this:

a <- c(1:10)
b <- a/sin(a)
###commline###    png('sin.png') #toplot
###commline###    plot(b)        #toplot
###commline###    dev.off()      #toplot
print(b)

To uncomment them:

  :%s/###commline###//g

I get this:

a <- c(1:10)
b <- a/sin(a)
png('sin.png') #toplot
plot(b)        #toplot
dev.off()      #toplot
print(b)

I am no computer scientist so I don’t know if there is a better, more elegant way of performing these kind of operations.

EDIT: It is important to mention that for plotting my data I need to go through many rounds of calculations and transformations so the different kinds of data fit in the plotting device. To perform these operations I use the history, I go up and down depending what I need.

Answer 1

Your approach looks fine to me.

If you can come up with a regular expression that captures all plot-related lines, you could do away with the #toplot marker, and let the comment substitution directly work on that instead.

You didn’t mention whether you re-type the substitutions or use the history. I would definitely define a buffer-local command (and/or mapping) for that:

autocmd FileType r command! -buffer Comment %s/.\+#toplot/###commline###\0/g
autocmd FileType r command! -buffer Uncomment %s/###commline###//g

(Or put the :commands! into ~/.vim/ftplugin/r_commands.vim.)

If you properly define the 'comments' setting for your filetype (e.g. add b:###commline###) and 'commentstring', you may also be able to use one of the general comment plugins (like The NERD Commenter), which offer nice mappings to toggle a comment on/off.