Additional arguments

“If you want to pass additional arguments to the components in your function, … is no good: there’s no way to direct different arguments to different components. Instead, you’ll need to think about how you want your function to work, balancing the benefits of having one function that does it all vs. the cost of having a complex function that’s harder to understand.”

  modifyList()
  do.call()

geom_mean <- function(..., bar.params = list(), errorbar.params = list()) {
  params <- list(...)
  bar.params <- modifyList(params, bar.params)
  errorbar.params  <- modifyList(params, errorbar.params)
  
  bar <- do.call("stat_summary", modifyList(
    list(fun = "mean", geom = "bar", fill = "grey70"),
    bar.params)
  )
  errorbar <- do.call("stat_summary", modifyList(
    list(fun.data = "mean_cl_normal", geom = "errorbar", width = 0.4),
    errorbar.params)
  )

  list(bar, errorbar)
}

And here is the result:

ggplot(mpg, aes(class, cty)) + 
  geom_mean(
    colour = "steelblue",
    errorbar.params = list(width = 0.5, size = 1)
  )