The rscatter package is an R package that creates an htmlwidget wrapping the regl-scatterplot
JavaScript library. An htmlwidget widget outputs HTML, CSS, and
JavaScript for viewing in various contexts that support HTML such as the
viewer pane in RStudio, interactive R Markdown and Quarto documents, and
Shiny apps.
In the case of rscatter the API is similar to other plotting functions in R and HTML is rendered that creates pan-and-zoomable scatterplots that scale to millions of points.
Installation
The rscatter package is not yet on CRAN. You may install it from the GitHub repository.
# Install remotes package if necessary
if (!require("remotes")) {
install.packages("remotes")
}
remotes::install_github("davidpross/rscatter", upgrade = FALSE)Basic usage
You can view the full documentation for the rscatter function here but you can get going quickly by simply passing your x and y coordinates.
You can interact with the rendered plot by zooming and panning it. There is no support yet for displaying axes and a legend.
Plotting values in a data.frame
Many times during exploratory data analysis we have our data in a data.frame object. You can plot the values from your data.frame as shown in the following example.
phi = seq(from = 0, to = 50, by = 1e-2)
fermat_spiral = data.frame(
x = c(-sqrt(phi)*cos(phi), sqrt(phi)*cos(phi)),
y = c(-sqrt(phi)*sin(phi), sqrt(phi)*sin(phi)),
branch = rep(c("a", "b"), each = length(phi))
)
rscatter("x", "y", size = 1.5, colorBy = "branch", data = fermat_spiral)Even with ~10K points the plot renders quickly and is responsive when interacting with it.