Stop Jenny committing arson

This image has been edited.

tl;dr

Make RStudio restart itself. Perpetually.

Passing the torch

Jenny Bryan once said:

If the first line of your R script is rm(list = ls()) I will come into your office and SET YOUR COMPUTER ON FIRE 🔥.

The objects in your R environment are wicked little imps whose only motivation is to deceive you. They must be destroyed. Frequently.

But rm() isn’t enough to start with a completely a clean slate. It doesn’t detach packages, for example. Reproducibility is at stake here, folks!

The only salvation is to completely restart R. All the time.

I don’t think you heard me. Come closer. I said all the time.

An extinguisher

I’ve been woke to this thought technology for a while. You’re right, it’s time I gave back to the community.

I can’t trust you to restart R voluntarily, so I must help you to help yourself.

So, I have for you a gift. A precious snippet of R code that came to me in a fever dream.

setHook(
  "rstudio.sessionInit",
  function(...) {
    message("⏳ You have 30 seconds...")
    Sys.sleep(30)
    rstudioapi::executeCommand("restartR")
  }
)

Simply open your .Rprofile (a special file that’s executed at start up) with usethis::edit_r_profile()¹, paste in the code² and then restart R for it to take effect³.

What does it do? When RStudio starts up it waits for 30 seconds and restarts R⁴.

…Which prompts another restart after 30 more seconds.

…And another.

…Forever⁵.

trapped in a loop help I’m

I know what you’re thinking: doesn’t this block the console? Kind of. You can still type stuff and it’ll be executed before the next restart. Only to disappear immediately.

Just like Jenny wanted! I think?

Rise from the ashes

How can you thank me for this? I am humble (extremely), but you’re welcome to support my Patreon.

Happy March 32nd, colleagues.

Environment

Session info

Last rendered: 2024-03-31 21:47:51 BST

R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16)
Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Ventura 13.2.1

Matrix products: default
BLAS:   /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.3-arm64/Resources/lib/libRblas.0.dylib 
LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.3-arm64/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib;  LAPACK version 3.11.0

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

time zone: Europe/London
tzcode source: internal

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] htmlwidgets_1.6.2 compiler_4.3.1    fastmap_1.1.1     cli_3.6.2        
 [5] tools_4.3.1       htmltools_0.5.8   rstudioapi_0.16.0 yaml_2.3.8       
 [9] rmarkdown_2.26    knitr_1.45        jsonlite_1.8.8    xfun_0.43        
[13] digest_0.6.35     rlang_1.1.3       evaluate_0.23    

Footnotes

1. Don’t.

2. Don’t.

3. Fine, do it.

4. If you’re feeling extra spicy, maybe randomise the wait period!

5. Maybe you’ll have to force quit RStudio? Use Cmd+Option+Esc on a Macintosh or Ctrl+Alt+Delete on Michaelsoft Binbows. I don’t need to tell Linux users what to do because they claim to know what they’re doing.

Reuse