Positron’s Jupyter Notebook Editor Is Now Generally Available

Data scientists are often forced to choose between the simplicity of the classic Jupyter notebook experience and the advanced capabilities of a general-purpose IDE. With the 2026.07 release, you no longer have to choose: Positron now delivers a first-class Notebook Editor inside an IDE built for data science.

If you’re new to Positron, here’s what the Notebook Editor is like in your daily work.

Environment management#

You clone your colleague’s repo and try to rerun their notebook. Which Python version do you use? What dependencies do you install and which versions? Did you previously set up an environment that you could reuse? You’re faced with all of these questions before you’ve run a single line of code.

Positron has several built-in workflows to help you manage your environments. When you open a repo, Positron discovers your installed environments, suggests the right one for the repo, and prompts you to set up a new environment if needed. The active environment is displayed front and center; click to restart or switch environments. Positron uses the same environment across your Jupyter and Quarto notebooks, scripts, and consoles. You can see inside your environments, which packages are installed, their versions, whether newer versions are available, and you can upgrade them. Environments are first-class citizens of Positron. Explore Positron’s environment management.

Interactive data exploration#

When you run a cell in your notebook, your variables appear in the Variables Pane. Filter, sort, and search your data in the Data Explorer, and try out plot variations in the Visualize wizard. You can easily convert your point-and-click interactions into code by using the copy-code feature to bring them back into your notebook. If you get stuck, look up library documentation in the Help Pane. All of this works out of the box.

Streamlined version control#

Notebooks store outputs and execution metadata alongside code, which is great for sharing but does not work well with version control. Positron includes settings to exclude outputs and execution metadata from the saved file, so the diff is just your code change. Explore the custom settings to clean up your git diffs.

Your notebooks stay ordinary .ipynb files and the editing experience stays classic Jupyter. When a plain-text workflow suits you better, conversion to and from .ipynb and other formats is built in.

AI assistance#

Posit Assistant sees your notebook as more than just text. It works with the live session behind the notebook: your variables, your data, your plots. Ask it to fix a chart and it can inspect the dataframe, look at the plot itself, edit the cell, and run it again. It does the same things you would do, using the same panes you use. Explore notebook-aware AI assistance in Positron.

Get started#

Download Positron and open a project with a Jupyter notebook. The Notebook Editor is now on by default. If you’re coming from another IDE, your existing .ipynb files will open as-is without any conversion needed.

For the full feature reference, check out our documentation.

If you run into any issues or have ideas on how we can improve Positron, reach out on GitHub.

Already using Positron? Everything in this release is in the release notes.

Thank you so much for helping us build Positron’s Jupyter notebook support from the ground up by chatting with us live, sharing your pain points, and giving us feedback on GitHub!