minis

A problem I encounter frequently when writing R packages is that I’ll find myself wanting to use a tiny slice of the functionality supplied by another package, but cannot justify taking a dependency on that package. Sometimes this happens because the tool I am writing needs to be a strict zero-dependency package (e.g., by design, sessioncheck cannot take dependencies). Sometimes it happens because the package that supplies the functionality is a very heavy dependency (e.g., ggplot2 is a complicated package that in turn depends on many other packages) but all I need is a tiny slice of what it does.

The “minis” repository is my own personal, partial solution to the problem. It is a collection of small, standalone, zero-dependency R components (“minis”), each witten as a single .R file with its own drop-in test suite. When a package needs a little bit of cli-style formatting, or a little bit of purrr-style mapping, or some other small convenience, but taking on the full dependency isn’t worth it, I can grab the relevant mini and copy it straight into my package without reimplementing the solution over and over again. Admittedly, it is rarely a pure “drop-in” situation: every package has its own need, so I almost always end up adapting the mini to suit the context, but even so I find it helps me enormously.

So I’ve started trying to collect these little snippets into a single place, making it easy for me to find them again rather than hunt around trying to remember where I solved this problem last time. The repository README outlines the full philosophy and usage instructions, if by some chance anyone else should care to reuse these solutions. Meanwhile, because each mini has its own worked vignette, this site exists to collect all these together (or alternatively, the README if a vignette doesn’t exist).

These are the minis that currently exist:

Mini	Purpose	Docs
minicli	Minimal cli-style coloured alerts/symbols/rules, with automatic fallback to plain text when ANSI/unicode isn’t safe.	Vignette
minimap	Minimal purrr-style map()/map2()/imap()/walk()/iwalk() and type-stable map_dbl()/map_lgl()/map_chr().	Vignette
minitrap	Minimal purrr-style safely()/quietly() function adverbs.	Vignette
miniverb	Minimal dplyr-style one-table verbs: filter()/select()/mutate()/arrange()/summarise(), with a shared .by grouping argument.	Vignette
minicase	Minimal dplyr-style case_when().	Vignette
minijoin	Minimal dplyr-style mutating joins, built on merge().	Vignette
minitable	Minimal tibble-style construction/coercion helpers.	Vignette
minicondition	Minimal rlang-style classed conditions, plus assert().	Vignette
minipivot	Minimal tidyr-style pivot_longer()/pivot_wider().	Vignette
ministr	Minimal stringr-style basic string manipulation (padding/trimming/case conversion/etc).	Vignette
minirx	Minimal stringr-style regex pattern matching (detect/extract/match/replace/split/count/locate).	Vignette
minicuts	Minimal erplots-style cut_quantile() and santoku-style cut_evenly().	Vignette
miniseed	Minimal withr-style RNG-seed management: with_seed()/with_preserve_seed()/local_seed()/local_preserve_seed().	Vignette