Question

What function can I use to emulate ggplot2’s default color palette for a desired number of colors. For example, an input of 3 would produce a character vector of HEX colors with these colors:

Answer 1

It is just equally spaced hues around the color wheel, starting from 15:

gg_color_hue <- function(n) {
  hues = seq(15, 375, length = n + 1)
  hcl(h = hues, l = 65, c = 100)[1:n]
}

For example:

n = 4
cols = gg_color_hue(n)

dev.new(width = 4, height = 4)
plot(1:n, pch = 16, cex = 2, col = cols)