Getting started with ctrlvee

What is ctrlvee?

ctrlvee lets you fetch R code from a URL and insert it directly into your editor. It is built as an add-in for Positron and RStudio, so you can pull code from web books, blog posts, vignettes, READMEs, and other online sources without copying and pasting by hand.

Installation

Install ctrlvee from CRAN:

install.packages("ctrlvee")

Or from GitHub with pak:

#install.packages("pak")
pak::pkg_install("vpnagraj/ctrlvee")

Using the add-in

The recommended way to use ctrlvee is through the IDE add-in.

Here is the typical workflow:

1. Open any .R script in Positron or RStudio
2. Place your cursor where you want the extracted code to appear
3. Launch the add-in via Addins > Extract External R Code and Insert Inline (or with keyboard shortcut)
4. Paste a URL into the dialog (for example, a rendered Quarto bookchapter)
5. The extracted code is inserted at your cursor, along with a comment about where it came from

Using ctrlvee programmatically

Stritcly speaking, you don’t have to use the add-in. The package includes exported functions that you can call from the console or from your own scripts.

library(ctrlvee)

## crawl code chunks from a rendered quarto chapter
result <- crawl_chunks("https://dstt.stephenturner.us/validation.html")

## inspect the result
result

## check the detected strategy for a rendered page
detect_strategy("https://dstt.stephenturner.us/validation.html")

## force the html strategy explicitly
crawl_chunks(
  "https://dstt.stephenturner.us/validation.html",
  strategy = "html"
)

Provenance

When ctrlvee inserts code into your editor, it includes a comment at the top that records the source URL. This is intentional. Knowing where code comes from is important for reproducibility.

Before running extracted code, keep the following in mind:

• Review first Look at the code before you run it. Make sure you understand what it does.
• Check the license Code being publicly available does not mean it is free to reuse however you like. Always read the license.
• Install dependencies External code often assumes certain packages are already installed. You may need to install them yourself, and be aware that package versions may have changed since the code was written.

Examples to try

To get a feel for what ctrlvee can do, the table below provides some example URLs to try. They are organized by source type so you can see the range of content that ctrlvee handles.