simlandr
Potential landscape tooling settling onto standard R generics after two rounds of renaming.
Comparison · Analytics
gghighlight vs rmediation
A side-by-side editorial comparison of gghighlight and rmediation — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
gghighlight vs rmediation: 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 rmediation?
RMediation shipped a three-normal CDF, then found it was silently wrong.
RMediation is a long-standing CRAN package for confidence intervals on mediated effects, now built on an S7 class hierarchy. Over eight weeks it added ProductNormal3 for serial indirect effects of the form a1*a2*b, folded the engine into the existing pprodnormal naming family, and then replaced that engine outright after finding it returned wrong probabilities without warning. The dev branch is at 1.7.0; CRAN still serves 1.6.1.
gghighlight vs rmediation: 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.
rmediation
3.8ANALYTICS
RMediation shipped a three-normal CDF, then found it was silently wrong.
◆ Current state
RMediation is a long-standing CRAN package for confidence intervals on mediated effects, now built on an S7 class hierarchy. Over eight weeks it added ProductNormal3 for serial indirect effects of the form a1*a2*b, folded the engine into the existing pprodnormal naming family, and then replaced that engine outright after finding it returned wrong probabilities without warning. The dev branch is at 1.7.0; CRAN still serves 1.6.1.
◆ Where it's heading
The package is moving from a hand-rolled numerical layer to one that checks itself: the new default integrator escalates its node count until successive rules agree, warns when it hits the cap instead of returning a number, and exposes a diagnostics argument for the convergence estimate. The correctness fix went to dev ahead of the CRAN window rather than being held for it, which suggests wrong-answer bugs are treated as release-blocking regardless of cadence. Serial mediation is where the new surface area is concentrated.
◆ Prediction
1.7.0 exists specifically to land before CRAN's 2026-08-21 update window, so the next move is a CRAN submission promoting it to main; whether hcubature survives past that as a cross-check option is the open question.
Alternatives to gghighlight and rmediation
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 rmediation.
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 rmediation alternatives →
Recent activity from gghighlight and rmediation
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 15h agormediationv1.7.0 — pprodnormal3() correctness fix ⚡
- 1mo agormediationp_prod3() renamed into the pprodnormal family
- 1mo agormediationProductNormal3: exact CDF for a product of three normals ⚡
- 2mo agormediationmedfit reaches CRAN; Remotes pointer dropped
- 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 rmediation?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. rmediation is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 3.8 vs 0.0), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is gghighlight better than rmediation?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. rmediation is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 3.8 vs 0.0), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. 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 rmediation?
Top rmediation alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "rmediation alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/rmediation for the full list with editorial commentary on each.