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Is Positron for me?

Note

Positron is an early stage project under active development. We don’t expect it to be the best fit for everyone doing data science right away.

Positron might be a good fit for you today if…

  • you use VS Code for data science (Python or R) but wish it included more affordances for data-specific work like a dedicated console, variables pane, data explorer, and ways to interact with your plots.
  • you use Jupyterlab for data science (Python or R) and are ready for a more powerful, fully-featured IDE.
  • you use RStudio and want more ability to customize or extend your IDE.
  • you use additional languages beyond only Python or R in your day-to-day data science or package development work, like Rust, C++, JavaScript, or Lua.

Positron might not be a good fit for you today if…

  • you need stable, polished software, as Positron is still in beta and some features are unstable or unfinished.
  • you need all the features of the RStudio IDE, as Positron doesn’t have all RStudio’s features; some notable absences are inline output for Quarto and R Markdown, profiling, Sweave, RStudio Add-In support, etc.

Machine prerequisites

Before installing Positron, ensure your Python and/or R environments are ready to work with Positron. You don’t need to install both, but Positron doesn’t bundle either Python or R.

Windows prerequisites

If you’re using Windows, make sure you have the latest Visual C++ Redistributable installed.

If you’re an R user, note that Positron doesn’t currently bundle Rtools. If you need Rtools for your package development or other work, you can either use the official guidance from CRAN on installing Rtools and putting it on the PATH, or alternatively, use rig to install and set up Rtools:

rig system rtools add

Python prerequisites

Positron works with actively supported versions of Python, from 3.8 to Python 3.12. We recommend pyenv and pyenv for Windows for managing Python versions. On Linux, you’ll want to be aware of the build requirements; for example, you’ll need the system library for SQLite (sqlite-devel or libsqlite3-dev) installed ahead of time so pyenv can properly build your chosen Python version for use with Positron.

Positron communicates with Python via the IPykernel package, so it needs to be installed for the Python environment you want to use with Positron. If you are managing your Python project using a tool like venv or conda, add ipykernel to your requirements.txt file. You can install IPykernel manually as follows:

python3 -m pip install ipykernel

Alternatively, Positron prompts you to install the IPykernel package if it isn’t found when you initially try to use a Python environment.

R prerequisites

Positron requires R 4.2 or higher. To install R, follow the instructions for your operating system at https://cloud.r-project.org/.

Alternatively, if you’d like to have multiple R installations, rig is a great tool to manage this which works well with Positron.

If you’re an R package developer, you will also want to make sure that you have the current versions of certain R packages, all of which had recent updates to make them work more smoothly in Positron. Run one of the code snippets below to ensure that you are up-to-date:

# if you're a pak person (we are!)
pak::pak(c("usethis", "cli", "crayon", "rlang", "roxygen2", "pkgload"))

# or using base R
install.packages(c("usethis", "cli", "crayon", "rlang", "roxygen2", "pkgload"))