Changing Distance and Linkage of a heat map

I am trying to change the distance and linkage of my heat map from the standard
Euclidean Distance and Complete linkage to any other setting for a question in my homework.

We are using this data set:

library("flexclust")
data(milk)
help(milk)

this is my current code:

hm3<-heatmap(milk_matrix, scale="column", main="Heat map of the Composition of Mammals' Milk", xlab= "Nutrient", ylab = "Animal", cexRow = 0.6, cexCol = 1.1, col=heat.colors(10))
legend(x= "bottomright", legend=c("min", "med", "max"),  cex = 0.6, fill=heat.colors(3))

R help for heat map says you can change the distance/ linkage by:

distfun=
and
hclustfun=

but I have had no luck typing something such as hclustfun= "single".

Any help would be greatly appreciated ! I can specify any distance or linkage as long as it is not Euclidean Distance and Complete linkage.

Kind Regards,
Rosie

heat map changing distance and linkage

For the distfun and hclustfun arguments you have to use options already available in the stats::dist() and stats::hclust() (check their help). So for example for distfun based on "maximum" distance measure instead of the default "euclidean" you can use the following:

# dist method must be one of "euclidean", "maximum", "manhattan", "canberra", "binary" or "minkowski"

heatmap(as.matrix(milk), 
        scale="column", 
        main="Heat map of the Composition of Mammals' Milk", 
        xlab= "Nutrient", 
        ylab = "Animal", 
        cexRow = 0.6, 
        cexCol = 1.1, 
        col=heat.colors(10),
        distfun = function(x) dist(x, method = "maximum"))
legend(x= "bottomright", legend=c("min", "med", "max"),  cex = 0.6, fill=heat.colors(3))