👀 Slime-peek

A Neovim plugin that adds several convenience functions for data exploration, allowing you to swiftly peek at your R and Python objects together with vim-slime.

slime-peek-demo.mov

✨ Features

• Peek at the head / tail of the object under the cursor
• Peek at the column names of the object under the cursor
• Peek at the dimensions of the object under the cursor
• Peek at the data types / classes of the columns of the object under the cursor
• Automatic language- and file type-detection for R and Python

📚 Requirements

• Neovim >= 0.7.0
• The vim-slime Vim plugin

📦 Installation

You can install the plugin with your preferred package manager:

{
    "fasterius/slime-peek.nvim",
    dependencies = "jpalardy/vim-slime",
    config = true,
}

🚀 Usage

slime-peek does not set any key mappings by default, but instead provides several commands that you can set key binds for: The plugin will automatically detect which language you are working with, whether that be R / Python scripts or R Markdown / Quarto documents and send the appropriate code to vim-slime. The commands available are as follows:

• PeekHead: Print the head of the word under the cursor.
• PeekTail: Print the tail of the word under the cursor.
• PeekNames: Print the column header of the word under the cursor.
• PeekDimensions: Print the dimensions of the word under the cursor.
• PeekTypes: Print the data types of the columns of the word under the cursor.
• PeekHelp: Print the help pages of the word under the cursor.

If you want to create a key map for the commands, you can do something like this:

vim.keymap.set('n', '<localleader>h', ':PeekHead<CR>')

You can also access the underlying plugin function directly:

vim.keymap.set('n', '<localleader>h', require('slime-peek').peek_head)

Note

Please note that slime-peek doesn't actually have any knowledge regarding the objects that are sent to your REPL, so if you try to get e.g. the dimensions of a dimensionless object you'll receive an error.

⚙️ Configuration

slime-peek comes with the following options and their respective defaults:

{
    -- Uses the Quarto YAML header for language detection instead of using the
    -- current code chunk's language. This is useful if you want to specify
    -- Quarto languages in a document-wide manner, rather than per code chunk.
    use_yaml_header = false
}

A complete installation and configuration might look something like this:

{
    "fasterius/slime-peek.nvim",
    dependencies = "jpalardy/vim-slime",
    keys = {
        { "<localleader>h" },
        { "<localleader>T" },
        { "<localleader>n" },
        { "<localleader>d" },
        { "<localleader>t" },
        { "<localleader>H" },
    },
    config = function()
        local peek = require("slime-peek")
        peek.setup({
            use_yaml_language = false,
        })
        vim.keymap.set("n", "<localleader>h", peek.peek_head)
        vim.keymap.set("n", "<localleader>T", peek.peek_tail)
        vim.keymap.set("n", "<localleader>n", peek.peek_names)
        vim.keymap.set("n", "<localleader>d", peek.peek_dimensions)
        vim.keymap.set("n", "<localleader>t", peek.peek_types)
        vim.keymap.set("n", "<localleader>H", peek.peek_help)
    end,
}

Note

Please note that slime-peek assumes that vim-slime has been correctly installed and configured.

📕 About

If you already perform data exploration and/or analyses using R / Python, Neovim and vim-slime (or if you'd like to start doing so), slime-peek.nvim is for you! The aim of this plugin is to provide convenient ways for simple data exploration tasks while working with a REPL using the vim-slime plugin. The tasks include things such as looking at the head of a data frame or the column names of a data frame. These are not complex tasks, but it is convenient to have them a shortcut away when working on e.g. a Quarto document with some data analysis project.

The plugin will automatically detect which of the supported languages are currently in use in your document, whether that be Python or R scripts, R Markdown or Quarto documents. For scripts and R Markdown documents, the language is inferred by the file type, as those documents are only used with their respective programming language. For Quarto documents, slime-peek will check the current code chunk's language by default, with an option to instead use the language specified in the YAML header of the document (using either engine:, knitr: or jupyter:).

This plugin was originally just a few functions living in my Neovim config, but I decided to formalise them into a plugin and share it with others. I hope you find it useful!