🚀 The Positron Notebook Editor is now in Alpha! Try it out and share your feedback

[cindyytong]

Following up on our previous post: we are excited to share that the Positron Notebook Editor is now officially in Alpha!

You can read the full announcement and the vision behind it here: Announcing the Positron Notebook Editor

While the editor is now live, we are still in the early stages and your feedback is more critical than ever. We want to know how the Alpha is working for your actual workflows.

Please try it our and provide your feedback by commenting below or booking time to chat live with us here.

Check out the docs to get started.

Thanks!
Cindy, Product @ Posit PBC

[wamalab]

For R users, .ipynb notebooks must reliably render R htmlwidgets (e.g., DT, plotly, leaflet, reactable). Without native support for R’s JS-based widgets, notebooks are not viable for interactive EDA.

This gap is the primary reason I continue to use RStudio notebooks and have not switched to Positron or VSCode. Until R htmlwidgets work end-to-end in ipynb notebooks, Positron cannot replace RStudio for interactive R-based exploratory data analysis.

[cindyytong]

Thank you @wamalab! This is on our radar. For alpha launch we are focusing on Python and R is up next. If you're open to chatting , we'd love to explore with you how we can make widgets work even better. Feel free to find time here.

[juliasilge]

We are tracking this in #4219, if you'd like to add a 👍 or additional info on your use case.

Are you interested in using .ipynb specifically? Or would you prefer to have inline output (for plots, htmlwidgets, etc) in a .qmd as described in #5640?

[wamalab]

I am interested in using .ipynb specifically. I like a lot of little things about .ipynb that .qmd doesn't have, e.g., seeing how long it takes for a cell to run.

[LoonanChauvette]

Hi, mostly replying to this : "What makes a notebook experience truly productive for your work ?"
I've been playing around a lot with Marimo recently for python stuff, and it's pretty much the best notebook experience I've had ever. Everything just works, the UI is super clean and decluttered, and the reactivity is a game changer for productivity and code quality. I just wish we could have a fraction of this experience for working in R.

[wamalab]

Just checked out Marimo after reading your comment and it seems great. Python gets all the cool stuff, sadly.

[cindyytong]

Hi @LoonanChauvette Thank you for the response. I'd be curious to hear about how you've used Marimo and how some of these features should translate for R users. Would you be open to chatting with me by finding some time here.

Hi @wamalab happy new year! R notebook support is on our roadmap too :)

[kv9898]

Apologies in advance as I know this is not a .ipynb-related response. But I (and many folks I believe) really really really want inline output for .qmd/rmd documents (#5640 basically), if they are considered "notebooks".

Would be super grateful if that could be prioritized!

[cindyytong]

Hi @kv9898 don't apologize! Thank you for sharing and this is an area we are actively investigating. Are you willing to chat with me by finding some time here.

[KYBfarmdroid]

Not specifically notebook related, but when writing and testing code in the console for fine tuning, this issue is low key one of my main frustrations with Positron: #8738

[juliasilge]

If you can add a 👍 on the specific issue you are interested in, that helps us with prioritization.

[marcdotson]

One pain point as I've been teaching students who want to use Jupyter notebooks, having the kernel in the Jupyter notebook not match the selected interpreter has been a problem as discussed in #5922.

[cindyytong]

@marcdotson Thank you for sharing this feedback, we agree.
We are currently working on the native Positron Notebook Editor which will be released in our upcoming release.

If you'd like to be a design partner to help improve this new notebook expereince, I'd love to chat with you, please find time here.

[Raesu]

A couple bits of feedback before disabling the alpha flag:

1. The UI refresh looks nice and I like seeing how long ago a block was run.
2. I lost the button to copy a chart, and I'm not able to right click a chart. So, hard blocker for me using this right now.
3. In order to run a cell, I first need to activate it to show the Play button. Having this button always show (or at least on mouse-over) is much more convenient.
4. When printing a data.table object, column names were wrapping onto 2nd line which I have never seen before. I set options(width = 240) in my notebooks and typically I can horizontal scroll if needed.

[cindyytong]

@Raesu Thank you for the helpful feedback and kind words! If you ever want to jump on a live call to share more please feel free to grab time here here.

1. Thank you!

2. Right click copy options are in the works Notebooks : Enable right click on output - clear cell output for individual cell #10489
   I'd be curious to learn if you want to use the plots pane more for your notebook plots

3. This is in the works and will be available next release.

4. Documented in this ticket. Make the output view horizontally scrollable for text outputs #11720

[Raesu]

Thanks. A button to send a chart to the plot panel would be useful if I can resize it. I believe in RStudio i was able to resize plots dynamically.

Good to see progress on everything else. One other thing I'd note (and I think you have this tracked) is to have the repr options work (plot height, width, dpi, etc). Overall very happy with Positron!

[cindyytong]

We will do exploration related to notebook <> plots pane in this ticket #10806

[AlexanderKyng]

Hi everyone!

I have been playing with Positron's Juoyter Notebooks for a few days now and the experience was mostly very good. I like the design you chose to go with, more modern than the original. But I have a couple of demands.

First, I'd like to be able to customize a little more the notebook font sizes, as I like my Markdown titles to be bigger than what they actually are, their size confuses me a little right now. Also, I have been playing with the new extension for Julia in Positron and I have been pleasantly surprised by something that I hopped Positron would do for a while : the plots appear on the Plots pane, not on the cell's output. I guess that won't be a feature for everyone but I love working like this. At first I thought it was a new feature from the Positron's notebooks but... No. At least not for Python, as the plots keep showing on the cells' outputs, not the plots pane. I would trully love to have the ability to output Python's plots on the dedicated pane, rather than on the cell's output and I hope you guys will choose to implement this.

I will keep on working with this alpha and will stay in touch if I come across any other idea or request!
Thank you for your great work Posit, Positron is now my prefered IDE.

[juliasilge]

Thank you so much for trying out the new notebook editor! I have opened #12437 to track the notebook font size customization you mentioned.

For working with a notebook but wanting to see plots in the Plots pane, I think we are basically tracking that in #11142. I think the best way forward for this is with using the experimental "notebook console" feature, but as outlined there, we don't quite have that feature fully built out yet. I'll link your request over there!

[Olgerd2001]

Hi,
I tried to use the new positron notebook. I like the concept, but I notice an output issue.
While using the track function from rich.progress, the output shows only the first print statement in a cell. If I switch to another tab and then return to the notebook, the output appears correctly.

Example:

from rich.progress import track

print('Check')

for i in track(range(0, 5), description='iterating'):
print(f"Cycle : {i}")

At first, only 'Check' is displayed.
After reopening the notebook the full output of the cell appears correctly:

Check
Cycle : 0m━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 0% -:--:--
Cycle : 1━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 0% -:--:--
Cycle : 2━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 0% -:--:--
Cycle : 3━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 0% -:--:--
Cycle : 4━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 0% -:--:--
iterating ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100% 0:00:00

Regards.

[cindyytong]

@Olgerd2001 Thank you for raising this! I have logged this as an issue here #12502

We're also glad to hear that you are using the Positron Notebook Editor. If you're open to chatting live with me about feature gaps and other pain points you run into can you schedule time here

[ethanmed]

Positron Notebook is good, but Jupyter Notebook is better. An outline function would be a valuable addition.

[cindyytong]

Hi @ethanmed. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

We are adding outline capabilities here. Feel free to comment on that issue.

Our goal with the Positron Notebook Editor in alpha currently is to help bridge the gap between an IDE and the Jupyter ecosystem. If you're open to chatting with me live about how we can turn this experience from good to great for you please find time here.

[fbob]

Many thanks and congratulations for this Notebook Editor 👍
I think there's a significant market opportunity, particularly regarding the integration of Quarto documents into this type of editor. I'm thinking especially of all Obsidian users (like myself) who appreciate the power and versatility of its interface but lack the integration of scientific processing tools and the enormous versatility of Quarto for document export.
A more feature-rich CodeMirror visual editor coupled with MathLive for equation editing would have enormous potential.
Keep up the great work and thanks again!

See for ex :

• https://github.com/MizarZh/mathlive-in-editor-mode
• https://github.com/artisticat1/obsidian-tikzjax

[cindyytong]

Hello @fbob thank you for sharing your feedback! Are you open to sharing more over a live call? Please find time here.