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ggvis

Status

ggvis is currently dormant. We fundamentally believe in the ideas that underlie ggvis: reactive programming is the right foundation for interactive visualisation. However, we are not currently working on ggvis because we do not see it as the most pressing issue for the R community as you can only use interactive graphics once you've successfuly tackled the rest of the data analysis process.

We hope to come back to ggvis in the future; in the meantime you might want to try out plotly or creating inteactive graphics with shiny.

Introduction

The goal of ggvis is to make it easy to describe interactive web graphics in R. It combines:

a grammar of graphics from ggplot2,
reactive programming from shiny, and
data transformation pipelines from dplyr.

ggvis graphics are rendered with vega, so you can generate both raster graphics with HTML5 canvas and vector graphics with svg. ggvis is less flexible than raw d3 or vega, but is much more succinct and is tailored to the needs of exploratory data analysis.

If you find a bug, please file a minimal reproducible example at https://github.com/rstudio/ggvis/issues. If you're not sure if something is a bug, you'd like to discuss new features or have any other questions about ggvis, please join us on the mailing list: https://groups.google.com/group/ggvis.

Installation

Install the latest release version from CRAN with:

install.packages("ggvis")

Install the latest development version with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("rstudio/ggvis")

Getting started

You construct a visualisation by piping pieces together with %>%. The pipeline starts with a data set, flows into ggvis() to specify default visual properties, then layers on some visual elements:

mtcars %>% ggvis(~mpg, ~wt) %>% layer_points()

The vignettes, available from https://ggvis.rstudio.com/, provide many more details. Start with the introduction, then work your way through the more advanced topics. Also check out the various demos in the demo/ directory. See the basics in demo/scatterplot.r then check out the the coolest demos, demo/interactive.r and demo/tourr.r.

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Version

Install

install.packages('ggvis')

Monthly Downloads

3,643

Version

0.4.10

License

GPL-2 | file LICENSE

Maintainer

Hadley Wickham

Last Published

February 10th, 2026

Functions in ggvis (0.4.10)

Print out the structure of a ggvis object in a friendly format

compute_boxplot

Calculate boxplot values

Layer lines on a plot.

compute_tabulate

Count data at each location of a categorical variable

Handlers and interactive inputs for plot sizing.

Determine if an object is a broker object

Align positions using length.

Divide data into groups.

Bin data along a continuous variable

Interactive inputs bound to arrow keys.

Create an interactive checkbox.

Create a broker object

Export a PNG or SVG from a ggvis object

Create a new ggvis_scale object.

Cocaine seizures in the US.

Determine if an ggvis is dynamic (i.e. needs to be run in a shiny app)

default_options

Default options

Create a new interactive "input" object.

Send a message to ggvis running on client

ggvisOutputElements

Create HTML elements for ggvis output

Create interactive control to select one (or more options) from a list.

Create an interactive slider.

Create an axis_props object for controlling legend properties.

Tools to save and view static specs.

Add a date-time scale to a ggvis object.

Visualise a data set with a ggvis graphic.

compute_model_prediction

Create a model of a data set and compute predictions.

Stack overlapping data.

ggvisControlOutput

Create a ggvis control output element in UI

layer_densities

Transformation: density estimate

Create a new layering function.

Handle brush events on a visualisation.

Handle mouse actions on marks.

layer_model_predictions

Overlay model predictions or a smooth curve.

Determine the "type" of a vector

Manage a list of properties.

Compute the "resolution" of a data vector.

Guess the right type of layer based on current properties.

is.legend_props

Tests whether an object is a legend_props object

Create a subvisualisation.

Create new prop object

layer_histograms

Display binned data

Display data with a boxplot.

Is an object a ggvis object?

Property domain.

Define padding.

Display data with bars (a barchart).

scaletype_to_vega_scaletype

Given the type of a ggvis scale, get the name of its corresponding vega scale

propname_to_scale

Convert the name of a property to the name of its default scale.

Create an interactive text or numeric input box.

Get data from a ggvis object

Print out the vega plot specification

Send a message to the client to show or hide a tooltip

Create a linked brush object.

Determine if range of vector is close to zero, with a specified tolerance

vega_data_parser

Determine the vega data type for a vector

Create a new "mark" object.

Tests whether an object is an axis_props object

is.scaled_value

Tests whether an object is a scaled_value object

Create a property.

View in a ggvis plot in the browser.

knit_print.ggvis

Knit print method for ggvis plots.

sidebarBottomPage

Create a page with a sidebar

Add a scale to a ggvis plot

Create a scaled_value object

Waggle back and forth between two numbers

set_scale_label

Set the label for a scale

Add a numeric scale to a ggvis object.

Add a ordinal, nominal, or logical scale to a ggvis object.

Connect a ggvis graphic to a shiny app.

Set options for a ggvis plot