Should progress use a custom width option like cli?

[MilesMcBain]

This is a kind of reboot of this issue I opened up on cli: https://github.com/r-lib/cli/issues/56

My symptoms with progress are similar to those I describe there, i.e. I have bulk text blowing up my REPL because the progress bars are 10000 characters long. I use this setting because it makes printing of dataframes and tibbles nicer (in ESS).

So right now I have this in my .Rprofile:

options(
  cli.width = 80,
  width = 10000
)

It would be nice if I could limit the progress bars to 80 chars.

[jimhester]

If you want wider tibbles there is already a custom option for that, tibble.width. I don't if there is a great alternative for regular data frames, but you could always define a custom print method if you want. From the documentation options("width") is clearly explicitly meant to be the width of the terminal window, so IMHO I don't think it would be necessary to add an additional option.

[gaborcsardi]

@jimhester this is all true, but it also makes sense to have an option for progress. I think we can just use the same cli.width option.

[gaborcsardi]

As we are focusing on cli now for progress bars, I am going to close this now.