Positron June Release Highlights

Welcome back to another edition of our monthly Positron updates! Each month we share highlights from our latest release and useful resources.

Posit Assistant#

Last release we introduced Posit Assistant , our unified, data-science-focused approach to AI assistance. This release continues that work, and we want to give you advance notice that the older Positron Assistant will be deprecated in the next release. If you are still using Positron Assistant, we encourage you to migrate to Posit Assistant now.

Posit Assistant supports the same broad set of providers as Positron Assistant, along with the Posit AI model provider and new experimental support for Google Vertex. Learn more about the differences between the new Posit Assistant and the older Positron Assistant:

You may also be interested in comparing Posit Assistant and Claude Code .

New in Posit Assistant this release, you can use the Posit AI model provider for Next Edit Suggestions, which propose your likely next change as you edit. You can also access the Configure Language Model Providers item in the accounts menu. You can ask a question, report a bug, or request a new feature for Posit Assistant separately from Positron now, but don’t worry too much about where to send your feedback; we will help route it to the right place!

Packages pane improvements#

We introduced the Packages pane last release, and this release makes it more informative and flexible. A Show Help button and context menu entry on every package take you straight to its documentation in the Help pane . You can now combine category filters as an intersection, so you can narrow the list to, for example, packages that are both attached and outdated. A new Item Size toggle lets you switch between a compact row view and a richer card view that surfaces package descriptions and other metadata.

For R users, the new packages.r.installer setting controls whether installs, updates, and removals use pak, base R, or an automatic choice. The setting that controls the pane has been renamed to packages.enabled ; the previous positron.packages.enable setting is deprecated but still honored.

Inline output for Quarto#

Inline output for .qmd documents was one of Positron’s most-requested features ever, and it is now out of preview. A new toolbar button in Quarto documents gives you one-click access to running cells, managing inline output, and showing the console.

Inserting code into a Quarto document from the History pane now automatically wraps it in cell markup when you drop it into a prose region. You can opt into inline output with the positron.quarto.inlineOutput.enabled setting.

Faster startup#

We continue to invest in performance improvements, and Positron starts up even faster in this release. Positron now caches previously discovered system interpreters, dramatically speeding up startup in new folders and projects; you can control this with the new interpreters.discoveryCache.enabled setting. On Windows, we fixed multi-minute startup delays by skipping slow PATH discovery by default, governed by the new positron.r.interpreters.pathDiscoveryMode setting. We also fixed an occasional hang at “Preparing” when starting Positron after updating to a new version.

A more customizable interface#

This release gives you finer control over Positron’s chrome so you can tailor the interface to your workflow. Several layout settings that previously weren’t always honored now work as expected:

• workbench.topActionBar.visible reliably hides and shows the top action bar at runtime
• workbench.secondarySideBar.defaultVisibility is respected when you set it explicitly
• workbench.secondarySideBar.showLabel lets Secondary Side Bar items render as compact icons

You can also enable window.commandCenter to bring the command center into the title bar. Learn more about some of our own team members’ favorite customizations:

R language intelligence#

Positron’s R language support now understands symbols within a file. You can rename a local symbol and have every use of it updated at once, and Go to Definition and Find References now work for local symbols, so you can jump to where a variable is defined (such as via <- or a function parameter) or see everywhere it is used within a function. Renaming symbols across files is not yet supported, but it is coming soon.

What’s coming next#

• We have some exciting milestones planned for our July release! The new notebook editor for .ipynb files , the Packages pane , and Posit Assistant will all come out of preview to general availability. We are thrilled for these features to be ready for your production workflows, and we hope you will give them a try and share your feedback .
• We’re still prototyping first-class SQL editing and execution in Positron, including support for visualizations with ggsql . We’ll share more as this takes shape, and in the meantime, let us know your thoughts and current pain points!
• If you will be at the Databricks Data + AI Summit next week, join us to learn about using Positron and Workbench within the Databricks platform.
• We are looking forward to posit::conf(2026) in September, where our team will have several sessions on Positron. The conference program was released last week and we are pretty excited about everything happening! Register now to join us in person in Houston or virtually from anywhere in the world.