Comment by ryanmonroe

To reference variables in the outer scope, you would do

    mutate(df, b = .env$a + 1)

And if you have a string (contained in a_var) which identifies a variable you can do

    mutate(df, b = .data[[a_var]] + 1)

You could argue these feel clumsy, but I wouldn’t say it’s “hard” to do either of these things with dplyr.