Announcing the Positron Notebook Editor for Jupyter Notebooks
Today we’re releasing an early alpha version of the Positron Notebook Editor, a new unified experience we built from the ground up for working with Jupyter notebooks as part of Positron, our data science IDE.
Jupyter notebooks are central to modern data science in many user groups. However, when you bring notebooks into a traditional IDE, you face a difficult compromise: you get the power of advanced IDE features, but you lose the essential simplicity of the classic Jupyter experience.
This early alpha release marks a milestone in Positron’s continued support for the Jupyter ecosystem, aiming to solve this problem.
The Batteries Included Experience for Jupyter Notebooks
Positron is “batteries-included”: everything works out-of-the-box by default without additional extensions or dependencies. With the Positron Notebook Editor, we’re bringing the exploratory simplicity of Jupyter notebooks together with the full capabilities of a data science IDE.
Here are some of the key built-in features that enhance your notebook workflow:
- Environment management: Switch between multiple Python and R environments easily.
- Variables Pane: View and inspect variables in your session.
- Data Explorer: Explore your tabular data interactively and generate reproducible code.
- Assistant: Accelerate your workflow and enhance code quality with integrated AI assistance.
- Help Pane: Access rich, hyperlinked Python and R documentation directly in your IDE.
- Publisher: Deploy and publish your notebooks seamlessly.
- Shiny Assistant: Turn your insights into interactive applications via Shiny Assistant.
Why we built the Positron Notebook Editor
We built the Positron Notebook Editor to treat your .ipynb files as first-class citizens in an IDE tailored specifically for data science workflows.
Previously, Positron used the Code OSS Jupyter notebook editor, like VS Code. While functional, the editor was designed for general purpose usage across a variety of cases, which limited how much the UX could specialize to data science workflows. By building our own editor, we moved beyond these limitations to give you a tool that can deeply understand and interact with your data.
Context Aware AI that Understands Your Notebook
As one early example of what’s possible with this new foundation, we have deeply integrated the Positron Notebook Editor with Positron’s AI Assistant:
- Context-Aware: The Assistant has access to rich context about your notebook, including cell states, execution history, and outputs such as images and tables.
- Dynamic: Assistant follows your work and can dynamically suggest actions to improve your notebook.
- Actionable: With your permission, Assistant can directly edit, reorder and run cells in your notebook.
- Transparent: You can inspect and control the specific context the Assistant is using.
- Collaborative: You can “follow Assistant” as it works and the notebook will automatically scroll and highlight cells as they’re edited.
This brings AI closer to a first-class notebook experience, and is just one example of what’s possible with our new notebook editor. Whether you use AI features or not, you’ll benefit from a faster and more capable notebook environment, with more to come.
What about Quarto?
Quarto remains a core part of the Positron ecosystem.
Quarto extended R Markdown’s beloved authoring model by building on the proven, language-agnostic Jupyter ecosystem, and Positron continues to support that vision across both R and Python.
The Positron Notebook Editor only supports .ipynb today, but it was designed for cross-language and cross-format growth. The work we’re doing here lays the groundwork for richer authoring experiences in the future, including:
- Editing
.qmd files in a Jupyter notebook editor. - Viewing outputs inline in both notebook and source editing modes.
- Tighter connections between exploratory analysis and polished reports.
What alpha means
This early alpha release is geared toward early adopters. The core foundation has been built: Python works well today thanks to its long history of Jupyter notebook support, while R support is still being refined.
Although there are known rough edges, we’re releasing early because we believe that the best tools are built in collaboration with the community, and we want your feedback.
Share your feedback
Our goal with the alpha release is to shape the Positron Notebook Editor together with the community.
Please try it out and give us your feedback:
-
- Download Positron: Install a release from February 2026 and on.
- Enable the Alpha: Enable the positron.notebook.enabled setting to get started.
- Explore the Demo: Check out our tutorial repository for examples of how to leverage the new features.
- Check out, vote on, and discuss our roadmap on GitHub which includes:
a. Polished R notebook workflows
b. Notebook console scratchpad
c. SQL support
d. Improved version control
e. Data-aware table of contents
f. And more – we want to hear from you! - Book time to chat with us directly.
- Explore all of the features Positron has to offer.
