[R] most stable way to output text layout

[Jeremie Juste]

Hello,

I'm trying to print a razor thin front-end using just text matrices and
the command prompt.

I admit that it is a bit crazy, it seems to do the job and is very quick
to implement...  Except that I don't know of to fix the layout.

I'm just seeking to map column names to a standard domain in an
interactive way.

For instance, at one iteration, the following matrix is produced:

mat <- structure(c(NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, 
NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, "a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g", 
"h", "i", "j", NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, 
NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, "n_missing:", "n_unique:", "freq:", 
NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, "0", "10", NA, "a", "1", NA, NA, 
NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, "b", "1", NA, NA, "best match: [1]:", 
NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, "c", "1", NA, NA, "foo", NA, NA, NA, NA, 
NA, "d", "1", NA, NA, NA, NA, NA), .Dim = c(10L, 10L))


which I represent in the console using the following command


    apply(
      mat,1,
      function(x) {
        x[is.na(x)] <-""
        cat(x,"\n")
      })

Do you have any suggestion for how can I have better control on the
print layout of the  matrix so that I can fix the width of each cell?

Best regards,
-- 
Jeremie Juste