Let’s talk about Positron!
Kolkata R User Group (Online)
Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal
Imperial College London
2025-08-27
What is Positron?
- Next-gen IDE for data science
- Was available for beta testing and has recently moved to stable release
- Fork of the open-source project that builds VS Code
Who is the audience?
- Primarily R users
- Most experience with RStudio
- Maybe tried VS Code, Jupyter, etc.
Ideology
- Polyglot (multilingual) IDE
- Support for both R and Python
- Unlike single-language IDEs (MATLAB)
- Real-world projects often require different programming languages
Familiarity
- Similar to RStudio (in layout - console, editor, help, plots)
- Based on VS Code OSS
Positron Layout - New Window
These slides
Demo with data
- Help on
irisdataset:?iris - Store
irisdataset in a variable:data <- iris - View the dataset
- Notice the summary of the columns
- Can apply filters
- Can plot from the dataset:
plot(data$Sepal.Length, data$Sepal.Width) - Try with another dataset:
airquality
Thanks
- Julia Silge’s talk A first look at Positron, useR! 2025 virtual session
Resources
- Positron’s GitHub Repository: https://github.com/posit-dev/positron
- Website: https://positron.posit.co
Slides
- Slides made using quarto in Positron
Learning more
About Positron: https://positron.posit.co
Talk link: saranjeetkaur.github.io/intro_positron/
GitHub: SaranjeetKaur
Email: kaur.saranjeet3@gmail.com
Thank you!
saranjeetkaur.github.io/intro_positron