I switched to Positron a few months ago and have mostly found it seamless.
I'm an academic bioinformatician/data scientist and I mostly use R to do my data visualization and table wrangling. I use quarto documents. Before positron I used RStudio as well as VSCode with lots of extensions to add R functionality there.
My main gripes with Positron are no inline plots underneath code chunks, and some bugs where sending code to the console from code chunks occasionally stops working until restarting the program, and View() occasionally stops working. But the better file explorer, integration with Claude Code, and access to most of my VSCode extensions make it worth it for me.
ayhanfuat · 2h ago
The common answer to "why do you fork instead of building an extension" is "these are not possible with VS Code extensions". Is this true? Or is it easier to monetize when it is a fork?
jmcphers · 1h ago
It is true. Some things you can't build in extensions for VS Code are:
- core services (Positron's core language system is an API, and R and Python are extensions)
- native panes (you can contribute webview panes but they're slow!)
- toolbars for other panels, or global toolbars
- modal dialogs or any UI other than notifications and quick-pick lists
- custom layouts
At a higher level, Positron is a platform that contains data science tools for _other_ extensions to use, and doesn't make sense as an extension itself. The R and Python extensions are the first two we built, but the platform is extensible to other languages.
gclawes · 1h ago
What's different between Postiron's core language system and language systems like LSP and DAP?
jmcphers · 1h ago
It's a higher-level construct. LSP and DAP are both used by Positron! But they're a pretty small subset of everything you actually want to do with a language. For example:
- discover all the interpreters on the system for the language (e.g. 'find me all the Pythons')
- start an interpreter session for the language
- run a fragment of code in the language and return the result
- get all the variables in the current interpreter session for the language
- view data defined in a particular variable
etc.
We generally try not to invent new protocols; in addition to LSP and DAP, we use Jupyter messages and kernels for most of the above. Positron only has custom protocols/APIs for the bits that are outside the purview of existing protocols.
LMKIIW · 2h ago
I've been using for over 4 months and I think it's great - both Python and R. Plenty of DS features that make VS Code feel more competent as data exploration tool.
datadrivenangel · 3h ago
Basically R studio/Spyder + Cursor built on the Code - OSS behind VSCode.
Potentially very exciting. The early builds a year or two ago that I tried were too buggy to replace R Studio, but a tight integration of good data tools, a good IDE, and modern AI coding assistants is going to be very powerful if posit nails this.
j_bum · 33m ago
The only thing from keeping me from transitioning from RStudio to Positron is the lack of inline plots in Quarto files.
Is there any plan or consideration for this to be implemented? It's a wildly important aspect of mine and many other RStudio user's analysis pipelines.
jmcphers · 14m ago
It is among our most upvoted feature requests! It is under consideration. Inline output has proven to be a pretty divisive feature; a sizable proportion of users don't like input output at all and consider it a misfeature in RStudio. See e.g. https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/issues/5280
Out of curiosity, do you prefer source or visual mode when working with inline Quarto output?
I prefer source mode when building Quarto files in RStudio.
Thanks for listing this feature request... It's pretty shocking to me to see that so many people don't use inline plots! I am particularly fond of them for ensuring that plot dimensions are correct so that I don't need to resize everything once I render a report and add it to my Quarto website.
From curiosity on my end - are inline plots a technically challenging problem? I have no idea if VSCode would enable something like this out of the box. :)
moelf · 1h ago
This is Jupyter but without Julia :(
(reference: Ju in Jupyter is Julia)
dvt · 1h ago
I have a feeling that hardcore data scientists will continue to use RStudio because of the huge ecosystem there, while data engineers will continue to use VSCode which is, at least for me, good enough with a few extensions that let me run notebooks and data visualizations when I need to do data work. In other words, I'm not sure if there's a niche here.
stoorafa · 35m ago
I understand the strategy isn’t to find a niche in the sense of a specific set of users, but to broaden and cover more niches
The niches exist (overlapping niches aside), but agree with the skepticism since I also wonder whether the switching cost is worthwhile for many users
dash2 · 52m ago
The ecosystem is just R packages, right? There's also RStudio integration with e.g. rmarkdown, knitr, quarto etc. but presumably all of that can also come in positron.
dvt · 40m ago
Yeah, I'm a huge fan of rmarkdown & knitr, not sure if that's Positron compatible—I know that I get RStudio menus/dropdowns that come with those integrations.
stoorafa · 37m ago
Not completely—as far as ecosystems there are RStudio addins, but I wouldn’t bet addins are extensively used
panbd · 3h ago
Behold, a free-as-in-beer, source-available program that brands itself as "free and open source".
This moving the goal posts of open-source to exclude anyone making money off of it is annoying. I can get the project for FREE and I can see the source code and make changes to it. How is it not open source? Because I can't also turn around and sell it?
adw · 1h ago
Nonfree license. You may or may not like the Elastic license but it's definitely not OSD.
gnulinux · 1h ago
There is no moving goal post. The license isn't an open source license, which by definition means the code is not open source. When you have access to source code of a program, but don't necessarily have the legal rights to distribute original and/or modified programs, it's called "source available".
cd4plus · 1h ago
It's really a shame posit quadrupled the cost of rstudio server/workbench because these tools are really nice in an academic hpc environment
actinium226 · 3h ago
Not exactly new, but I do think it has promise as a MATLAB replacement for Python. Spyder already does quite a good job at that though.
dmicah · 2h ago
I think PyCharm does a pretty good job as being a MATLAB-like IDE replacement for Python.
hacker_yacker · 58m ago
Cool. I use AI to cook up custom interfaces for each project.
greenflag · 2h ago
For R+RStudio users, any opinions on the switch? Assistant seems to be the big departure, trying to work out if worth losing keyboard shortcut muscle memory for
jmcphers · 1h ago
Positron has a setting that restores (most) RStudio keybindings, so your muscle memory should (mostly) transfer:
This has been in beta for over a year, and unfortunately R users mostly seem to hold onto RStudio with a religious conviction so I haven’t really seen much adoption among the target demographic in my circles.
a-dub · 2h ago
i wish they had a more exhaustive list of all the features they offer beyond vscode or cursor, otherwise it's hard to evaluate what exactly it brings to the table.
autoit · 2h ago
Yep, ill give it a try, but i dont see myself switching away from VSCode.
xnx · 2h ago
Being able to install Gemini Code Assist is a big plus over RStudio.
shellfishgene · 1h ago
I was wondering for a while already why Posit had seemingly dropped the ball on AI support in RStudio...
fluorinerocket · 2h ago
I'll stick with spyder
piskov · 3h ago
Meh. Another vscode reskin. And calling it IDE is a bit presumptuous.
I'm an academic bioinformatician/data scientist and I mostly use R to do my data visualization and table wrangling. I use quarto documents. Before positron I used RStudio as well as VSCode with lots of extensions to add R functionality there.
My main gripes with Positron are no inline plots underneath code chunks, and some bugs where sending code to the console from code chunks occasionally stops working until restarting the program, and View() occasionally stops working. But the better file explorer, integration with Claude Code, and access to most of my VSCode extensions make it worth it for me.
- core services (Positron's core language system is an API, and R and Python are extensions) - native panes (you can contribute webview panes but they're slow!) - toolbars for other panels, or global toolbars - modal dialogs or any UI other than notifications and quick-pick lists - custom layouts
At a higher level, Positron is a platform that contains data science tools for _other_ extensions to use, and doesn't make sense as an extension itself. The R and Python extensions are the first two we built, but the platform is extensible to other languages.
- discover all the interpreters on the system for the language (e.g. 'find me all the Pythons')
- start an interpreter session for the language
- run a fragment of code in the language and return the result
- get all the variables in the current interpreter session for the language
- view data defined in a particular variable
etc.
We generally try not to invent new protocols; in addition to LSP and DAP, we use Jupyter messages and kernels for most of the above. Positron only has custom protocols/APIs for the bits that are outside the purview of existing protocols.
Potentially very exciting. The early builds a year or two ago that I tried were too buggy to replace R Studio, but a tight integration of good data tools, a good IDE, and modern AI coding assistants is going to be very powerful if posit nails this.
Is there any plan or consideration for this to be implemented? It's a wildly important aspect of mine and many other RStudio user's analysis pipelines.
Out of curiosity, do you prefer source or visual mode when working with inline Quarto output?
You can follow the Positron feature request over here: https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/5640
Thanks for listing this feature request... It's pretty shocking to me to see that so many people don't use inline plots! I am particularly fond of them for ensuring that plot dimensions are correct so that I don't need to resize everything once I render a report and add it to my Quarto website.
From curiosity on my end - are inline plots a technically challenging problem? I have no idea if VSCode would enable something like this out of the box. :)
(reference: Ju in Jupyter is Julia)
The niches exist (overlapping niches aside), but agree with the skepticism since I also wonder whether the switching cost is worthwhile for many users
These guys' PR is trying too hard.
The source code looks very open.
This moving the goal posts of open-source to exclude anyone making money off of it is annoying. I can get the project for FREE and I can see the source code and make changes to it. How is it not open source? Because I can't also turn around and sell it?
https://positron.posit.co/migrate-rstudio-keybindings.html
Dataspell is IDE.