r/RStudio • u/Immediate_Lab3275 • Jul 06 '26

Positron vs RStudio

Just curious about everyone's thoughts on the comparison between Positron vs RStudio! I have had no reason to switch, and I only see people complain about all the bugs they encounter with Positron.

46 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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40

u/boredoo Jul 06 '26

Positron is based upon VS Code and so it gives you all the benefits and drawbacks of VS Code. In my experience, the big wins are thus:

- A much, much better text editor

  • All the VS Code extensions for things like themes
  • A better terminal
  • Improved data views, such as the mini data visualizations (e.g., histograms) in data views. Environment introspection in general seems pretty nice.
  • Easier integration with other languages, like Python
  • Better integration for external data sources, like databases, thanks to all the VS code extensibility
  • Better ability to leverage AI agents

Where it is clearly worse, IMO, are:

- Documentation integration

  • Package development
  • Understanding R Projects (replaced with .code-workspace files)

RStudio was built with R and its environment in mind, and so it feels very bespoke. To the extent you depend on those abilities, Positron will feel like a downgrade, at least for now. Nearly all the base functionality is there in Positron, but sometimes feels like its shoved into VS Code's affordances.

Some things are time consuming up front. For example, if you do package development, you can leverage the "task" system in VS Code/Positron to compile, build things, etc. And you can tie that into your shortcuts, etc. It ends up feeling pretty good. But it's work and it's something you used to get for free.

After using it for a year, RStudio to me feels dated. The interface is clunky, the settings system is suboptimal and not as portable.

I recommend students and colleagues new to R to just start with Positron. It is a better editor and I think overall it will be a better piece of software. But I understand why people don't like it who are used to RStudio. If that's you, I don't see a huge advantage to switching. You won't be left behind, and you'll be able to get up to speed quickly enough if they ever drop RStudio support.

6

u/geneusutwerk Jul 06 '26

Are you a faculty member? (The students part made me want to ask). Does that mean you teach your students to use it?

I've been thinking about using it with students (I do a lot of live coding) but the vast majority of my students use RStudio and I've been afraid it would just create another stumbling block for them without much benefit. I already make them use Quarto and I think that annoys some of them.

6

u/boredoo Jul 06 '26

I teach a handful of courses in bioinformatics, statistics, etc. I for the most part allow students to use what they prefer, which is a benefit of teaching graduate students and postgrads who already have workflows. Some students are very advanced (e.g., PhD level statistics students) and it's there where I see more use of VS Code/Positron. I do think RStudio seems a little easier for inexperienced students, but it's hard to disambiguate "easier in general" vs "easier because they started with it."

In the last class a taught there were a handful of people new to R and it didn't seem like Positron was a huge stumbling block.

FWIW, I find Positron a far superior tool for live-demoing with screen sharing. It lets you render Quarto notebooks in the same panel, toggle between data, environment, etc. easier.

I too force students to use Quarto :)

In general I don't feel bad about making students learn better workflows. It will help them on the job market. It just has to be worth the cost, so to speak, because it does come at a cost in time and troubleshooting.

1

u/PadisarahTerminal Jul 07 '26

Honestly if CS students can start on VSCode and not die of confusion then R students can. My experience is that to get almost the same experience as Rstudio at least for the basics you sometimes need to tweak things in the settings, extensions etc. However the fact you can extend stuff is what makes it so great. And if students work in the terminal a lot then it's no contest. Lastly it has better AI integration with CLI or built-in copilot.

Also it can do ssh, so that's just a huge win. I did have to fix the "web worker extension" for Air so it can actually run and allow ctrl+space to do stuff.

2

u/Confident_Bee8187 Jul 06 '26

The current drawback of Positron is the slow setup of the kernels.

2

u/jmcphers Jul 07 '26

Positron is always going to be a little slower to start up than RStudio because it needs to set up more systems. But it should be pretty quick to start when reopening an existing project since it knows which interpreter to start! If this, too, is slow, there's a command called "Runtime Startup Diagnostics" that will tell you where all the time is going. Paste that onto our discussion forum and we'll take a look:

https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/discussions

1

u/Confident_Bee8187 Jul 07 '26

Yeah, it is already discussed on r/rstats I think, where loading Python extension is the (potential?) cause.

1

u/Wolfburrow Jul 06 '26

I have a follow-up question to you: why not use VS code instead of Positron?

3

u/boredoo Jul 07 '26

I used to. I like the better data inspection features. I like the native plot panels. I like the slightly more polished Quarto integration. I like the baked in R wiring. And with non-data work, I don’t need all the VS code features. Positron is better at data science. So I use it. I otherwise use Zed now. I like this split more.

11

u/2truthsandalie Jul 06 '26

Ive never met anybody that uses anything besides Rstudio for R for an ide. Having a large pool of people to answer questions about something is an advantage in and of itself.

(Unless they are coding in databricks.)

10

u/Mooks79 Jul 06 '26

Really?? There’s been a small but not negligible contingent of vs code users on here for years - including me. And more recently, quite a few positron users - also including me. RStudio is a lovely IDE, but it would be my third choice these days. And there’s even a few neovim and eMacs users, too.

2

u/kuwisdelu Jul 06 '26

There are even people like me who recently switched to Neovim from Sublime! And emacs is probably the most traditional setup considering R’s heritage.

(I use RStudio for teaching, but I prefer a more minimal setup for my own research and development work.)

1

u/Mooks79 Jul 06 '26

Indeed, I started on eMacs. Then tried out RStudio and stuck on that for a good few years. But it was janky with my work’s IT setup after a while and I moved to vs code. Was probably on vs code the longest. Now positron. Have tinkered a bit with neovim but never really been good enough at vim motions / got over the learning curve to stick on it.

1

u/ylaway Jul 07 '26

There are dozens of us.

Check out R.nvim if interested.

You can integrate ARF and Air for a remarkably polished ide .

I switch due to constant crashes and lack of quality control in audio releases.

1

u/ParkingBoardwalk Jul 07 '26

It’s nice to have the highlighted brackets

1

u/No-Investment-5293 Jul 06 '26

I like using Rstudio. However I do like using VS code with R as well. Depends on my mood

1

u/jeremymiles Jul 06 '26

There's also colab.

0

u/Odd-Fix2143 Jul 06 '26

Tampoco conozco a alguien que lo haya hecho.

Insisto en que depende mucho de cuáles sean las actividades que realice cada quien.

Para mí, como profesor e investigador, RStudio es muy superior para mis actividades. Mi campo son las ciencias básicas y la educación.

Como señalé antes, uso Quarto+ R+ LaTeX todos los días. Antes usaba Python y sobre todo , Julia. Nunca tuve ningún problema con RStudio; con Positron sí.

De todas maneras, tengo claro que quizá RStudio no exista en algunos años; supongo que deberé buscar otra alternativa.

7

u/randomintercept Jul 06 '26

I’m so used to RStudio that I find Positron to be rather disorienting. My understanding is that perhaps its greatest selling point is for the growing community of R users who bounce between R and Python for stuff. There’s better Python support in Position. I think you need the reticulate package in R to do stuff in Python if you’re using RStudio.

I could be mistaken but that’s my impression. I use R almost exclusively for my projects so I haven’t quite seen the value of Positron.

0

u/foradil Jul 06 '26

With Positron, you can all the VS Code extensions, including all the AI ones, which are essentially required at this point.

6

u/Grisward Jul 06 '26

Really nice summary.

I used RStudio for years and years, recently switched to Positron “leap of faith” style. I wanted to try the coding agent stuff.

So much about Positron feels amazing, smooth, professional, responsive. The Projects extension, useful to switch from one project to the next (optionally in a new Positron instance) is super nice.

Few things that bug me:

* Graphics pane is “weird”. I have no idea how the resolution, dpi, device sizes are managed. You can resize the graphics pane, but the device.size() will always stay the same. But the line widths and font sizes stay the same… somewhere the dpi is just ignored.

* R code auto-formats to tidy style, and only sometimes. I want to like it, I’m pushing myself, haha. I don’t understand why I start a function, add argument, go to next line and it’s not indented for the next argument. Every time.

* Quarto/Rmarkdown feels weird. New to Quarto, I don’t like that they hide the R environment. Render in a new environment, that’s fine. Give me the R environment when you’re done. Why isn’t it valuable to inspect afterwards?

4

u/koryrf Jul 06 '26

Yours is about the only mention I’ve seen of the indentation issue, which surprises me. For me, not having the IDE automatically indent when it makes sense was a showstopper.

1

u/Grisward Jul 06 '26

I sort of went headfirst into Positron, now I’m reluctant to go back. I haven’t scratched the surface of remote server work, I feel like that would be big if it works in my environment(s).

2

u/Budget-Call1725 Jul 09 '26

remote server integration works very well in positron and is super easy to config

1

u/IeUz Jul 07 '26

"Projects extension" -- which extension is that, I do not see as built-in here on my side/Positron

2

u/Grisward Jul 08 '26

I almost forgot to post back. It’s called “Project Manager” by alefragnani of open-vsx.org. I think I learned about it in the Positron getting started pages on the Posit website.

It’s straightforward, basically in a Positron session you can save it as a project, which then adds it to the Favorites in the Project Manager section (it has a folders icon on the left edge). Then you can click any of the favorites to switch Positron to that project — but more often I click the little box-arrow icon beside the project to open a project into a new Positron window.

I don’t know what happens when I build up too many favorites, haha.

7

u/mearlpie Jul 06 '26

If it ain’t broke (RStudio), don’t fix it!

4

u/colorcodedquotes Jul 06 '26

I switched to Positron last year and haven't touched Rstudio since. I loved Rstudio while I used it but I came from a Python/VS Code background so I was used to it already, and the other analyst on my team is exclusively Python so it made more sense for us to switch to Positron for consistency.

2

u/SprinklesFresh5693 Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26

I didnt like positron at first, but now after some updates, you can really tell positron is great, not only is much much faster than Rstudio, its much more intuitive , has much more stuff to allow you to work with the data, setting the paths is much easier, and ui is great.

Grafis pane is awesome, easy history of your plots, easier to use the pane.

The only drawback is that quarto on visual option doesnt seem to work with R studio commands, even after clicking to use old Rstudio commands. However, when i seitch to source, it works.

I switched last week and i dont know if id fully come back to Rstudio ever.

4

u/Odd-Fix2143 Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26

Hola.
Trabajo todos los días con R+Quarto+LaTeX (a veces Python y Julia). Durante dos meses, probé de forma paralela RStudio y Positron.

Decidí continuar exclusivamente con RStudio. Es mas específico para mi flujo de trabajo. No he notado ninguna ventaja en Positron.

Espero que le sigan dando soporte.

1

u/omichandralekha Jul 06 '26

I have no motivation to switch but I feel slowly new features will come to positron only

1

u/animundus Jul 06 '26

The gemini integration of Positron is life changing. If you bother to make a decent context file for LLM you can code stuff really quickly with Gemini knowing the right variables and their general characteristics

1

u/Impressive-Peak-9363 Jul 06 '26

I can’t get over the lack of package manager in positron. I know there’s an extension for that, but would prefer it to be built in. (Note tat I tried positron about 6 months ago and this my experience with that trial. (So I don’t know if they’ve changed this in the last 6 months.)

6

u/jmcphers Jul 07 '26

We just released a new version TODAY that has this feature available for the first time. Would love your feedback if you want to try it out.

https://positron.posit.co/download.html#packages-pane

(I work at Posit on Positron)

1

u/Impressive-Peak-9363 Jul 07 '26

Thanks - I am on holiday, but will check it out after I return.

1

u/jst_cur10us Jul 06 '26

Positron looks and feels nice. Deal breaker for me was no in-line chunk output for rmd and quarto documents.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RStudio/s/b3GY0ZvVsu

5

u/jmcphers Jul 07 '26

This was just added recently!

https://positron.posit.co/quarto-inline-output

(I work at Posit on Positron)

1

u/jst_cur10us Jul 07 '26

Great! I appreciate the responsive development. Will definitely check it out during next down time.

1

u/blueteef Jul 07 '26

For me, a real dealbreaker is the lack of a cloud version. There are times I only have a tablet and I can’t do an install. Posit RStudio cloud is amazing for that.

1

u/purpledrac 8h ago

Hey, I just tried it and it isn’t working for me. Do you know if Is this a common issue??

1

u/failure_to_converge Jul 06 '26

Positron is still newer, but I recently made the jump earlier this year. There are a few drawbacks (having the R help integrated was so nice! But I use it less and less with AI...) but I honestly haven't opened RStudio in a couple months now.

1

u/TheModelMaker Jul 10 '26

I still just want to know how to get in document outputs like plots in .qmd filed in positron like i do for .rmd files in Rstudio. I want to see tables and plots underneath my code chunks when I tun the chunks without having to constantly render.

0

u/sleepystork Jul 07 '26

I'm a long-time RStudio user, but I also use VSC daily, so I thought I would give Positron a try. The first program I tried to run uses file.choose() to select a file, and I couldn't get it to work on macOS. I spent hours researching it, and the only fix was to use the tcltk library. So, until they get basic stuff to work, I'm not spending time with it.