Get Started

👋 Hi and welcome to Nextjournal! You can use this notebook to play around with and familiarize yourself with the Nextjournal Editor.

Inserting content

To insert different kinds of content (text, code, data, and more), use the + buttons that appear below blocks of content, or press Cmd E, to open the menu with all the different content options. Try it for yourself!

Referencing and inspecting files

Here is a csv file that contains housing prices that we uploaded to this article. To upload files, drag them into the editor window, or click the “+” button (alternatively press Cmd E), and select “File”.

What follows is an R code cell that references the uploaded file, and reads it into a housing variable that we use later to create a plot.

To reference a file in the code cell, press Shift Ctrl/Cmd E, or look at your Command Bar at the bottom of your screen for the Reference file command.

library("tidyverse")

housing <- read_csv(housing-prices.csv)

housing

Now if you run the above code cell (by clicking on the play button or hitting Cmd/Ctrl+Enter), you’ll see the contents of the housing variable as a table.

Plotting some data

In our R code cell, we imported a library called tidyverse which comes with ggplot2, a tool for creating plots. We will use it to create a very basic scatter plot of housing prices over time for Massachusets (MA), and Texas (TX). All the data comes from the previously defined housing variable.

Run the code cell below to see for yourself!

ggplot(filter(housing, State %in% c("MA", "TX")),

       aes(x=Date, y=Home.Value, color=State)) + geom_point()

We could do plenty to make this plot much nicer looking, but why not play around with it a bit for yourself?

Working with other languages

Nextjournal is not restricted to R and plotting. In fact, you can use multiple different programming languages in the same notebook!

The next code cell shows how you can install a package using a Bash cell (in this case svgwrite), and how to use a Python cell to create a nice looking dot pattern:

pip install svgwrite

import math

import random

import svgwrite

dots, c, size, w, h = 3000, 6.1, 4, 670, 150

phi = (1 + math.sqrt(5)) / 2

rad_phi = (math.pi * 2) / (phi + 1)

dwg = svgwrite.Drawing("/results/spiral.svg", (w, h))

a = 0

for n in range (0, dots):

  r = c * math.sqrt(n)

  x = r * math.cos (a) + w / 2

  y = r * math.sin (a) + h / 2

  color = "#%06x" % random.randint(0, 0xFFFFFF)

  dwg.add(dwg.circle ((x, y), size, fill=color))

  a += rad_phi

dwg.save()

That’s it for now! There’s a lot more that Nextjournal can do, so we suggest that you, once you’re done experimenting here, head over to our Help page, and see what else you find interesting.

Running into trouble? Reach out to us anytime and we’ll help you out.