Printing tibbles in iESS with many columns extremely slow

Question

When I print large tibbles from R it takes a very long time and the iESS buffer runs extremely slowly thereafter (huge lag moving the cursor throughout the buffer or typing). The code below takes 5 minutes to finish printing whereas in Rstudio it takes a second. I'm using ess-17.11 and the latest tidyverse installed using devtools: devtools::install_github("hadley/tidyverse")

library(tidyverse)
library(gapminder)

start_time <- Sys.time()

tst_tibble <- gapminder %>%
  # change the year filter to add or subtract columns 
  # from the final tibble
  filter(year < 1975) %>% 
  unite(loc_yr, continent, country, year) %>%
  select(loc_yr, lifeExp) %>% 
  spread(loc_yr, lifeExp)

print(tst_tibble)
print(Sys.time() - start_time)

Any help?

Answer 1

This has been discussed on the ESS bug tracker at https://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS/issues/474. The problem has been fixed in the tibble package. If you cannot wait for to fix to be released to CRAN you can install directly from the master branch with devtools::install_github("tidyverse/tibble").