Improve your design workflow—and save time

Omit Running and Typing ggsave()

That is the obvious feature: as {camcorder} saves a file with the given specifications in the given directory every time ggplot() is called you don’t have to run ggsave() after a ggplot() function call.
Also, you don’t need to type or copy-paste and modify multiple ggsave() snippets which e.g. avoids overwriting your previous plot by default and keeps your code clean.

If you want to keep your plot files after the session, set the dir in gg_record to a permanent directory (instead of a temporary directory as in our examples).

Inspect the Final Plot Directly with Specified Dimensions

An often raised question is the responsive behavior of the Plots pane in the RStudio IDE. The dimensions used in that pane rely on the window size and are not at all related to any width and height in your script. That leads to the annoying user experience that one spends tremendous time on styling the size of geometries and theme elements—but once saved everything looks differently and likely off.

As {camcorder} is saving a plot file anyway, we make use of that and display the saved file in the Viewer pane of the RStudio IDE. Since the image was saved with the previously custom settings, the dimensions of the plot shown here matches exactly as you would use the same settings in a ggsave() call.

Note how the size of the geometries and elements stays the same independently of the window size and aspect ratio.