simlandr
Potential landscape tooling settling onto standard R generics after two rounds of renaming.
Comparison · Analytics
gghighlight vs ojoregex
A side-by-side editorial comparison of gghighlight and ojoregex — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Shared themes:r-package
gghighlight vs ojoregex: at a glance
What is gghighlight?
A single-purpose ggplot2 extension that has spent six years tracking ggplot2 instead of growing.
gghighlight adds one verb to ggplot2: highlight the series matching a predicate and grey out the rest, with unhighlighted_params controlling how the shadowed layer renders and calculate_per_facet deciding whether the predicate evaluates within facets. The API settled at 0.2.0; the 0.5.0 release supports ggplot2 v4.0 including its ink and paper theme elements, and finally deletes gghighlight_point() and gghighlight_line().
What is ojoregex?
Oklahoma's court-data nonprofit maintains the regex layer that turns charge text into categories.
ojoregex is Open Justice Oklahoma's pattern library for classifying criminal charge descriptions from court records — the unglamorous translation layer between free-text charge fields and analysable categories. Its entire release history reached this feed as four tags published within three minutes, so the feed order reflects a backfill rather than a shipping cadence. Release notes are merge references rather than descriptions, which limits how much can be read from the changelog alone.
gghighlight vs ojoregex: editorial side-by-side
gghighlight
0.0ANALYTICS
A single-purpose ggplot2 extension that has spent six years tracking ggplot2 instead of growing.
◆ Current state
gghighlight adds one verb to ggplot2: highlight the series matching a predicate and grey out the rest, with unhighlighted_params controlling how the shadowed layer renders and calculate_per_facet deciding whether the predicate evaluates within facets. The API settled at 0.2.0; the 0.5.0 release supports ggplot2 v4.0 including its ink and paper theme elements, and finally deletes gghighlight_point() and gghighlight_line().
◆ Where it's heading
Two threads run through the history. One is a slow deprecation, from soft-deprecating the geom-specific functions at 0.1.0, to defunct at 0.3.0, to removed at 0.5.0 — a five-year removal cycle. The other is compatibility work: purrr 1.0.0, dplyr's across() deprecation, ggplot2 3.4.0, then 4.0. Genuine feature additions are rare and small, with line_label_type at 0.4.0 the last one. Note that 0.3.2's notes restate 0.3.1's n() item, so adjacent tags here overlap rather than each describing distinct work.
◆ Prediction
The next release most likely absorbs further ggplot2 4.x changes, given that is what triggered the last three. Nothing in the entries points to a new highlighting capability.
ojoregex
0.0ANALYTICS
Oklahoma's court-data nonprofit maintains the regex layer that turns charge text into categories.
◆ Current state
ojoregex is Open Justice Oklahoma's pattern library for classifying criminal charge descriptions from court records — the unglamorous translation layer between free-text charge fields and analysable categories. Its entire release history reached this feed as four tags published within three minutes, so the feed order reflects a backfill rather than a shipping cadence. Release notes are merge references rather than descriptions, which limits how much can be read from the changelog alone.
◆ Where it's heading
What the notes do show is a package alternating between domain corrections and R tooling upkeep: a fix to property-crime matching in one release, dplyr select semantics in the next. That is the expected shape for a regex catalogue — accuracy work arrives as individual charge types get miscategorised in real analyses, and the rest is keeping the package installable against a moving tidyverse. Contributions come from a small internal team, and the vignette work referenced in the earliest tag suggests the pattern list doubles as documentation for analysts.
◆ Prediction
The visible pattern is incremental match fixes as charge types surface in use; the release notes carry too little detail to predict anything beyond that without reading the underlying pull requests.
Alternatives to gghighlight and ojoregex
Other Analytics products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either gghighlight or ojoregex.
lavaanExtra
SEM reporting helpers converging on APA output, one CRAN resubmission at a time.
ibis.iSDM
A raster-to-terra migration is the only readable change in a feed of merge notes.
anyflights
A nycflights13 generator whose recent work is all about the data being right.
vinereg
Conditional density and log-likelihood fill out a vine copula regression package.
stringx
A drop-in string API for base R, kept alive by upstream check failures.
See all gghighlight alternatives → · See all ojoregex alternatives →
Recent activity from gghighlight and ojoregex
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1mo agoojoregexPatch for dplyr select semantics
- 1mo agoojoregexojoregex v0.10.0
- 1mo agoojoregexNamespace prefixes fixed, plus a property-crime match bug
- 1mo agoojoregexFirst tagged release, carrying the whole development history
- 1y agogghighlightggplot2 v4.0 support; geom-specific functions removed
- 2y agogghighlightTest expectations updated for upcoming ggplot2
- 3y agogghighlightline_label_type adds geomtextpath and second-axis labelling
- 4y agogghighlightDeprecated dplyr::across() usage removed
- 5y agogghighlightExplicit NULL in unhighlighted_params preserved; aesthetic name clash fixed
- 5y agogghighlightDiscrete-scale labels and n() predicates
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between gghighlight and ojoregex?
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Analytics. gghighlight and ojoregex are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is gghighlight better than ojoregex?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. gghighlight and ojoregex are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Analytics products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to gghighlight?
Top gghighlight alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "gghighlight alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/gghighlight for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to ojoregex?
Top ojoregex alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "ojoregex alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/ojoregex for the full list with editorial commentary on each.