Positron Native Notebooks

Important

Positron Native Notebooks are currently in pre-alpha testing and are not yet available for production use.

We are targeting a public alpha in February 2026.

If you’d like to be an early design partner and help shape our future roadmap, please book time to chat with us here.

Our vision

Positron Native Notebooks provides a familiar notebook experience for Jupyter (.ipynb) files. Positron IDE features work out of the box in notebooks, including AI assistance, data exploration, and debugging.

Positron Notebooks Pre-Alpha

Positron Notebooks Pre-Alpha

Key features

  • Batteries-included experience, with no extensions required for core features
  • Improved user experience for core data science workflows
  • Notebook-aware AI assistance
  • Integrated data exploration (Variables Pane and Data Explorer)
  • Debugging that works out of the box
  • Your idea here! We want to hear from you about what features you want to see in Positron Notebooks.

These features are a work in progress, and we expect to regularly deploy changes as you are testing.

How to test

  1. Download the latest Positron release here. Use at least version 2025.12.1-4.

  2. Update your user settings to enable Positron Notebooks and Notebook AI features::

    1. Ensure Assistant is enabled: positron.assistant.enable
    2. Enable Positron notebooks: positron.notebook.enabled
    3. Enable Notebook AI features: positron.assistant.notebookMode.enable

  3. Pick a notebook to explore:

    1. Explore our demo World Happiness Report notebook by following the New > New Folder from Git workflow, or
    2. Create a new notebook:
      • Select New > New Folder from Template > Jupyter Notebook
      • Follow the instructions for folder creation and environment management

  4. When you open a .ipynb file for the first time, you see the default VS Code notebook UI. To see the Positron Native Notebook view:

    1. Right-click on the file in the Explorer

    2. Click Open With

    Open with

    Open with
    1. Select Positron Notebooks

    Positron Notebooks

    Positron Notebooks
    1. (Optional) Click the Set as Default button to always open .ipynb files with Positron Notebooks in the future
Tip

We recommend using the View: Notebook Layout command for the best experience. Search for this command in the Command Palette. This layout displays the Variables pane by default.

Share your feedback

We’d love your feedback. Please book time to chat with us here or:

  1. Complete this short survey to help shape what we build.

  2. File issues here for any bugs or improvements you want to see.

  3. Upvote on features you want to see next: