Hi!
This week I learned a cool fact about Ethiopian wolves. They’ve been caught red-handed licking nectar from red hot poker flowers and transferring pollen between plants, which means they might act as pollinators!
I also spent 243 536 minutes slogging through emails and ticking off boring administrative tasks (not cool at all) 🥱.
Meanwhile, I burned a few neurons while my body battled an unpleasant cold virus — so no code today, I’m afraid. Instead, I wanted to talk about shortcuts.
For my BSc dissertation, I looked at the Steiner Tree Problem in graphs. Does that ring a bell? No? Great — I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing either. But, to simplify, it’s one of those “what’s the shortest possible way to connect all the points” problems. This is ironic (and somewhat funny) because I’m the kind of person who always picks the longest route. I think my brain just didn’t get the memo when they were handing out algorithms for simplifying life…
So, it may not surprise you to hear that I didn’t learn about most useful R shortcuts until my master’s degree — but I’ve been using them ever since.
I will reveal this secret knowledge in a second, but if you want to know more about the Steiner Tree Problem and related topics, check out this.
If you’re just looking for something entertaining and need a break from cute kitten videos, check out these slime moulds (though note that there’s a small mistake in the title — slime moulds are protists, not fungi 🍄🟫).
Okay, enough rambling — I’ll keep it short and sweet. Here are the shortcuts:
Ctrl + L: Clears your console. It does a far better job than I do trying to clean my flat.
Ctrl + Up/Down Arrow: Access your command history. Alternatively, you can just use arrows in the console to access the most recent commands.
Tab: Autofill.
Ctrl + Enter: Run your code.
Command + Shift + C: Comment or uncomment your lines.
What I love about these shortcuts is how they make you look like a cool kid, even if you barely know how to load a CSV file.
I think that you can go through your relying only on these 5 shortcuts, but hey, if would like to see more, check out this handy R cheat sheet 💫.
Carpe diem,
Agnes
PS: Here is the survey in which you can tell me what R topic you find particularly confusing and why you want to learn it so that we can shape this space together!