nicer printing of list columns

[jennybc]

Seems like we will have more exotic objects in tbl_dfs in the near future. This poses a printing challenge. And whatever RStudio is doing in View() seems like a good idea. Here are two views of a tbl_df that has a bunch of tweets in it, stored as S4 status objects from the twitteR package. Could the regular print method behave more like View() and show less, to reduce the risk of obscuring other variables? Somewhat related to a question I posed on R-help and SO earlier this year.

[krlmlr]

We should definitely improve here. Copied reprex from your SO question:

library(Matrix)
library(dplyr)
m <- new("dgCMatrix")
isS4(m)
#> [1] TRUE
df <- data.frame(id = 1:2)
df$matrices <- list(m, m)
df
#> Error in prettyNum(.Internal(format(x, trim, digits, nsmall, width, 3L, : first argument must be atomic
tbl_df(df)
#> Source: local data frame [2 x 2]
#> 
#>      id
#>   (int)
#> 1     1
#> 2     2
#> Variables not shown: matrices (list).

## force dplyr to show the tricky column
tbl_df(select(df, matrices))
#> Source: local data frame [2 x 1]
#> 
#>                                                                      matrices
#>                                                                        (list)
#> 1 <S4:dgCMatrix, CsparseMatrix, dsparseMatrix, generalMatrix, dCsparseMatrix,
#> 2 <S4:dgCMatrix, CsparseMatrix, dsparseMatrix, generalMatrix, dCsparseMatrix,

[hadley]

@krlmlr I think I remember that you like to generate the NEWS from the git commits, so I didn't add a news entry.

[krlmlr]

Thanks. The NEWS are initialized from the bodies of the commit messages in "master" (4b6a6d1), the header is ignored. I can edit them afterwards (3cc26eb), often this isn't even necessary.

[github-actions]

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