Comparing Positron to RStudio

Observations on similarities and differences between the IDEs

It’s been a minute since Posit launched the beta for Positron, a new IDE for data scientists to explore data within a Visual Studio Code interface. The launch of Positron has sparked discussion on what the advantages or differences are.

In this post, I am going to share what I have noticed so far. You may find some additional differences, especially since Positron is a beta product. But I thought I would touch upon the clearest distinctions I see.

Layout

The most obvious distinct is the layout and its similarity to Visual Studio Code. There’s a reason for that similarity. Positron (and another IDE, Project IDX) is built on an open-source license from Microsoft via the Code-OSS repository. The Visual Studio Code that is familiar to most developers — that means downloaded and installed on one’s laptop — is a distribution of the Code-OSS repository with Microsoft-specific customizations released under a traditional Microsoft product license. So Positron has the general layout framework, but its developer Posit was allowed a license to modify that layout to suit.

This means while there is a general layout similarity that is useful such as extensions, Positron and ProjectIDX introduce…