Jupyter Notebooks

Jupyter Notebooks offer a flexible, interactive UI for combining code, prose, and visualizations.

Positron enhances Jupyter Notebooks in several key ways:

An example of a Jupyter Notebook in Positron, with interactive code, rich outputs, and the integrated Help Pane.

Using Jupyter Notebooks

You can create and edit .ipynb files in Positron just as you would in other editors. For a general introduction to working with Jupyter Notebooks, see the VS Code Jupyter Notebooks documentation.

Setting up your environment

Positron comes prepackaged with Jupyter kernels for R and Python. Once you’ve configured an R or Python environment for Positron, you do not need to install any additional dependencies into your environment before using notebooks.

If an environment installed on your computer isn’t available in Positron, you may want to read more about how Positron discovers Python installations and R installations.

Selecting an interpreter

When you first open a Jupyter Notebook, Positron automatically selects an interpreter based on the notebook’s language, the current workspace, and your configuration.

Tip

We recommend matching the selected interpreter for the workspace and the notebook, however, they can be controlled separately.

You can manually select a different interpreter for the notebook by clicking the Kernel Selector button in the notebook toolbar or by running the Notebook: Select Notebook Kernel command.

The Kernel Selector showing the selected interpreter for a new notebook.