easylayout is an R package that leverages interactive force simulations within the IDE itself (e.g., RStudio, VSCode). It is not yet another visualization library, but instead aims to interconnect existing libraries and streamline their usage into the R ecosystem.
easylayout takes an igraph object and serializes it into a web application integrated with the IDE’s interface through a Shiny server. The web application lays out the network by simulating attraction and repulsion forces. Simulation parameters can be adjusted in real-time. An editing mode allows moving and rotating nodes. The implementation aims for performance, so that even lower-end devices are able to work with relatively large networks. Once the user finishes tinkering the layout, it is sent back to the R session to be plotted through popular libraries like ggplot2 or even the base package itself.
Installation
You can install the development version of easylayout from GitHub with:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("dalmolingroup/easylayout")Example
This is a basic example which shows you how to solve a common problem:
library(easylayout)
library(igraph)
g <- igraph::erdos.renyi.game(n = 5000, p.or.m = 10000, type = "gnm")
number_of_vertices <- igraph::vcount(g)
igraph::V(g)$label <- NA
igraph::V(g)$size <- sample(1:5, number_of_vertices, replace = TRUE)
igraph::V(g)$color <- sample(rainbow(5), number_of_vertices, replace = TRUE)
plot(g, layout = easylayout, vertex.label = NA, margin = 0)