progressr: Replace 'cli' Progress Bars with 'progressr'

Henrik Bengtsson

The cli package is used for progress reporting by several packages, notably tidyverse packages. For instance, in purrr, you can do:

y <- purrr::map(1:100, \(x) Sys.sleep(0.1), .progress = TRUE)

to report on progress via the cli package as map() is iterating over the elements. Now, instead of using the default, built-in cli progress bar, we can customize cli to report on progress via progressr instead. To do this, set R option cli.progress_handlers as:

options(cli.progress_handlers = "progressr")

With this option set, cli will now report on progress according to your progressr::handlers() settings. For example, with:

progressr::handlers(c("beepr", "rstudio"))

will report on progress using beepr and the RStudio Console progress panel.

To make cli report via progressr in all your R session, set the above R option in your ~/.Rprofile startup file, e.g.

if (requireNamespace("progressr", quietly = TRUE)) {
  options(cli.progress_handlers = "progressr")
}

Note: A cli progress bar can have a “name”, which can be specfied in purrr function via argument .progress, e.g. .progress = "processing". This name is then displayed in front of the progress bar. However, because the progressr framework does not have a concept of progress “name”, they are silently ignored when using options(cli.progress_handlers = "progressr").