Pros and Cons of Positron

Posit recently announced that their code editor Positron is now available as a stable release. With Positron out of beta, I thought it might be useful to go over what it is as well as some of the pros and cons for users considering moving to Positron from RStudio.

Much of the rationale that Posit has given for Positron is to develop a code editor that works equally well for R and Python. Although this multilingual support isn't relevant to me (and, I suspect, many of you reading this), there are still many features that make Positron intriguing.

I decided to make a video to discuss what I see as the pros and cons of Positron.

Pros of Positron

• Better data table view: Includes glimpse view for quick data structure overview and ability to add filters directly in the viewer

• Better file explorer navigation: Much easier to navigate between folders and files without constant clicking back and forth like in RStudio

• Right-click "Reveal in Finder": Quickly jump to files in your system's file browser

• Enhanced find and replace: Filter by file type, exclude files, use regex, match case/whole words, and see all matches across files

• Visual commit history in Git tab: See all commits in a timeline view and visualize branches and pull request merges

• AI-generated commit messages: Uses GitHub to suggest commit messages based on your changes

• Visual .gitignore indicator: Ignored folders appear in gray so you can easily tell what's being tracked

• Hover for inline help files: See function documentation inline without having to run ?function_name

• VS Code-style extensions: Add custom functionality like Air (auto-formats code), Quarto support, Todo Tree (track TODO comments across project), and many other extensions

• Positron Assistant AI integration: Chat interface using Claude/Anthropic models to ask questions about code, edit code with natural language instructions, explain error messages in plain language, and suggest code fixes

• GitHub Copilot integration: Inline code completions that predict what you're likely to write next

Cons of Positron

• Learning curve: Takes time to adjust to a new tool even though it's similar to RStudio

• No packages tab: Can't see a list of all installed packages like you can in RStudio

• Command-click behavior different: Takes you to where object is defined instead of showing a preview/popup of the object like RStudio does

• Parameterized reporting issues: Can't access parameters (e.g., params$state) when running code chunks in Quarto documents, making debugging harder

Overall, I think Positron is a great IDE and I definitely recommend checking it out if you haven't yet. However, if you currently use RStudio and are happy with it, don't feel like you have to switch. Both are great code editors!