The searcher package (CRAN, GitHub) provides a search interface to look up terms on popular websites such as Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Twitter, StackOverflow, RStudio Community, GitHub, and BitBucket. Upon calling a search_*() function, a browser window will open with the search results for the query.

That said, a new year means new searcher capabilities! The searcher package received its biggest ever overhaul to date in its quest to provide a stable and customizable API. In particular, the search_*() functions are now generated using a function factory alongside pre-defined values. By changing the underlying structure, searcher gains future-proofing and a lower maintenance cost as code is no longer repeated multiple for each search portal.

Furthermore, this release gains a new set of customization toggles accessible via options() that allow for improved package experiences. In particular, the default search term used can be switched from a “base R” perspective to a “tidyverse” perspective by setting searcher.default_keyword = "tidyverse" in ~/.Rprofile.

Lastly, in a long overdue sense, searcher now has the ability to search Twitter’s #rstats community! The #rstats hash tag is a central location for discussions on R within Twitter. Try it out with:

searcher::search_twitter("datasaurus ggplot2")

For more details, please see the full NEWS entry below.

searcher news file entry for version 0.0.5 (2020-02-06)

Features

• Added search portal:
  • search_twitter(): Searches on Twitter. (#19, #30)
• Added ability to set default package actions. (#7, #20)
  • searcher.launch_delay controls how long the user remains in R prior to the browser opening. Default is 0.5 seconds.
  • searcher.use_rstudio_viewer specifies whether RStudio’s viewer pane should open the link instead of a web browser. Default is FALSE until RStudio’s sandbox issue is resolved.
  • searcher.default_keyword: Suffix keyword to focus search results between either "base" or "tidyverse". Default is "base".
• Added option to launch RStudio’s Viewer pane to display search results.
  • Note: This feature requires a patch per rstudio/rstudio#2252. (#21, #22)

Breaking Changes

• Function factory or a closure approach-based approach is now used to create search portal functions search_*() through searcher().
• searcher() function has lost the ability to specify rlang to address an unevaluated promise issue.

Fixes

• Addressed internal vignette index name being used as the title.

Deployment

• Switched from using TravisCI to using GitHub Actions for R. (#25, #27)
• Improved code coverage of unit tests (#29)

GitHub Changelog