Download Positron

Positron on desktop

Find out what you need to know before you install Positron, then download the desktop installer for your platform.

Accept license agreement

Please review Positron’s license agreement and privacy policy. Your acceptance of this license agreement and privacy policy is required as a condition to proceeding with your download or use of the software.

I agree to the Positron license agreement and Posit Privacy Policy.

Platform	Download	Size	SHA-256
Windows 10, 11 x64 (system level install)	Positron-2025.11.0-234-Setup-x64.exe	327M	26787c8
Windows 10, 11 x64 (user level install)	Positron-2025.11.0-234-UserSetup-x64.exe	327M	e94768a
MacOS 11.0+ (universal)	Positron-2025.11.0-234-universal.dmg	863M	0bd3946
MacOS 11.0+ (arm64/Apple Silicon)	Positron-2025.11.0-234-arm64.dmg	592M	48bfb23
MacOS 11.0+ (x64/Intel)	Positron-2025.11.0-234-x64.dmg	587M	f932dde
Debian-based Linux x64 (Ubuntu 20+)	Positron-2025.11.0-234-x64.deb	328M	ac8b342
Debian-based Linux arm64 (Ubuntu 20+)	Positron-2025.11.0-234-arm64.deb	316M	ca16c34
Red Hat-based Linux x64 (RHEL9)	Positron-2025.11.0-234-x64.rpm	371M	26bae66
Red Hat-based Linux arm64 (RHEL9)	Positron-2025.11.0-234-arm64.rpm	358M	960052e

Once you install Positron, it will automatically check for updates moving forward.

Positron Pro on Posit Workbench

Posit Workbench 2025.09.0 and later includes support for Positron Pro. To configure and use Positron Pro on Posit Workbench, please see the Posit Workbench Administration Guide and the Positron Pro user guide.

Release notes

Highlights

Remote sessions 🚀

This release brings a slew of improvements to the remote SSH experience in Positron. We’ve improved:

our UI treatment of configured hosts
the command to connect to your remote machine(s)
bundling of components such as Quarto
what happens when something goes wrong with the server download on your remote machine
how you can manage the installation location of Positron server

Additionally, the most upvoted feature in this month’s release is native support for remote sessions on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). You can now connect to WSL distributions as remote sessions in Positron, giving you a seamless development experience when working with Linux-based environments on Windows. If you previously used the community-maintained extension for WSL support, you will want to uninstall that extension and transition to the built-in functionality.

Positron Assistant 🤖

Our new release adds initial preview support for using Positron Assistant with models provided by Amazon Bedrock, in addition to the existing Anthropic and GitHub Copilot model providers and the experimental OpenAI and OpenAI-compatible model providers.

Positron Pro sessions on Posit Workbench benefit from a smoother authentication experience with Workbench-managed AWS Credentials. Positron Desktop users can get started with Bedrock models by manually authenticating via the AWS CLI.

We’ll continue to improve the Bedrock experience in Positron, particularly around authentication. Stay tuned for updates in future releases!

Customize your plots display 📊

One of the most upvoted features in this month’s release is a new setting to customize the default sizing policy for the Plots pane, giving you more control over how your visualizations are displayed. Use the new plots.defaultSizingPolicy setting to configure how your plots are displayed by default if, for example, you prefer to always start with the “fill” option instead of the “auto” option. You can still change the sizing policy via the UI for plots after they are created, but this setting lets you set your preferred default behavior.

Changelog

New features

[#10039] Added new preview Catalog Explorer functionality for interacting with data catalogs, with initial support today available for Databricks catalogs. This feature is in preview and can be enabled by opting in to the new catalogExplorer.enable setting.
[#4366] Remote sessions: added native support for remote sessions on WSL.
[#4799] Remote sessions: improved Remote-SSH: Connect to host command.
[#10017] Remote sessions: the new remoteSSH.serverInstallPath setting lets you customize the directory for the Positron server installation.
[#9788, #9983] Assistant: added a new setting positron.assistant.filterModels to configure available models. Positron provides defaults to this setting to only show models that are known to work well with Positron Assistant, but you can customize it as needed.
[#9388] Assistant: added a new setting positron.assistant.preferredModel to set the preferred model to pre-select in the model selector.
[#9388] Assistant: added a new setting positron.assistant.defaultModels to set the default model per provider.
[#9738, #9643] Assistant: now dynamically fetch Bedrock models from AWS.
[#9563] Assistant: enabled custom chat modes, instructions, and prompt files.
[#10174] Assistant: simplified project tree tool output structure.
[#9847] Data Explorer: updated the column selector to use our new backend search.
[#6582] Python: switched interpreter discovery to use the native locator by default.
[#10094] R: Positron now reads R repository configuration from /etc/rstudio/repos.conf automatically if no other repository configuration is present.
[#964] R: added a new setting positron.r.saveAndRestoreWorkspace to opt in to saving a workspace to .RData on exit and restoring on startup.
[#1301] The Shiny extension (which provides support for both Python and R) is now included as a bootstrap installed extension.
[#9554] Added support for Databricks-style # COMMAND ---------- code cells in .py and .R files. You can customize this behavior by changing the new codeCells.additionalCellDelimiter setting.
[#9573] Workbench: settings in Positron can now be enforced by Workbench admins.
[#8393] You can now paste or drop files as paths in R and Python scripts. You can copy files from a file manager and paste (or Shift then drop) into an R or Python file to automatically insert properly formatted, quoted file paths. Paths use forward slashes and are made relative when possible.
[#7268] Added new plots.defaultSizingPolicy setting to configure the sizing policy used for creating plots, and updated other existing plots settings to have new names plots.darkFilter and plots.freezeSlowPlots.

Bug fixes

[#9416, #9747] Assistant: fixed how Anthropic models call Copilot participants.
[#9283] Assistant: removed non-functional providers from “Manage models…” quickpick.
[#9919] Assistant: fixed the behavior of Assistant’s Console actions when Assistant is not enabled at all.
[#9929] Assistant: fixed streaming selection edits.
[#9990] Assistant: fixed tool to read R package help documentation.
[#9209] Assistant: quick chat now sources its model & context from the main chat interface.
[#9438] Assistant: Bedrock models no longer error in Agent mode when using Copilot tools.
[#10007] Assistant: fixed how Copilot accesses Positron’s tools.
[#9861] Assistant: Positron Assistant no longer stops after tool errors. The assistant now sees and responds to tool failures instead of ending the conversation.
[#8347] Assistant: now exclude the “Install Python Package” tool from Assistant Ask mode.
[#9047] Remote sessions: fixed errors connecting to WSL when using IPC transport.
[#8848] Remote sessions: if downloading the server tarball is canceled during Remote SSH, it will be retried upon the next connection.
[#6692] Remote sessions: addressed an issue that could create orphaned R and Pythons sessions in Remote SSH.
[#9812] Data Explorer: fixed formatting in histogram tooltips.
[#9836] Data Explorer: fixed layout problems when the summary panel is on the right.
[#9365] Python: no longer show unsupported Python versions in the New Folder Template flow.
[#9186] Python: fixed bug where environments created by Positron were displayed as version 0.0.1 on Windows.
[#9216] R: fixed handling of paths to R on Windows.
[#9813] R: now report the working directory with correct slashes on Windows, in the Console action bar.
[#8453] R: on linux 64-bit distros, “lib64” R_HOME paths are detected before “lib” R_HOME paths.
[#9985] R: fixed browseURL() behavior for non-ASCII text on Windows.
[#9467] R: fixed a crash when interrupting R while output is emitted in the console.
[#9927] R: the setting that restores an R workspace is now respected on Windows. Thanks to our contributor @kv9898!
[#917] R: the R backend is now more robust to loading issues of internal graphics packages such as ragg.
[#10192] The R backend now works on macOS 11. Thanks to our contributor @kv9898!
[#9488] Workbench: fixed a bug when opening workspaces such as with usethis::create_from_github().
[#10060] Workbench: fixed Positron details in the “About” dialog.
[#9631] Fixed the notebook.workingDirectory setting for untitled Jupyter notebooks.
[#7205] Fixed the positron.RuntimeCodeExecutionMode.Silent behavior for extensions, for queued code in the console. Thanks to our contributor @kv9898!
[#7861] Fixed what Positron reports to extensions in positron.runtime.getForegroundSession().
[#9820] Fixed Quarto bundling on Windows.
[#9575] Removed the limit on active console and notebook sessions.

Dependencies

Updated code-oss upstream to v1.105.0.
Updated vscode-python upstream to v2025.16.0.
Updated bundled version of the Air extension to 0.18.0. This update includes experimental support for tabular calls like tibble::tribble() and data.table::fcase().

Older releases

Older releases are available on GitHub, and you can also find the release notes for previous versions.