How to Set Default Yaml For R Markdown Documents?

Question

This is what I typically put at the top of my documents in R markdown:

---
title: Title
author: Amar Al-Zubaidi
date: \today
mainfont: Inconsolata Nerd Font
sansfont: Inconsolata Nerd Font
monofont: Inconsolata Nerd Font
fontsize: 11pt
table-use-row-colors: true
bibliography: /home/amarakon/Documents/bibliography.bib
csl: /home/amarakon/Documents/Citations/apa-no-initials.csl
classoption: letterpaper
output:
  pdf_document:
    keep_tex: true
    latex_engine: xelatex
    template: eisvogel
    number_sections: true
---

I do pretty much the same thing for every document. In fact, the only thing I change for every document is the title. I want to know how I can put all of these values in a file (except for the title), and change my compile command to read that file when compiling. This is the command I use to compile:

R -e "rmarkdown::render('file.Rmd')"

My end goal is to only have to put something like this in my Rmarkdown document:

---
title: my-title
---

Answer 1

I answered a similar question not that long ago using this information.

Since I had worked on that question, I only had to clone my last template and update the skeleton to create your template.

You won't have a YAML with just your title. However, all of the elements that you specified you wanted would be pre-written in the RMD file when you open a new file using this template.

You can see this repository at fraupflaume/customYAML2.

To install this template (it's not a package per se; there's no library):

devtools::install_github("fraupflaume/customYAML2")

When you want to start a new RMD script, go to templates -> Custom YAML -> customYAML2.

If you wanted to change this down the road, you can fork or clone that repository and edit it to your heart's content.

BTW:: let me know if you want me to remove the images. (It has your name in them: here and on Github.)