Thoughts after trying to use positron

[david-priest]

I'm sure many of these things have been discussed before:

1. VSCode looks awful, and there appears no way to get the nice pixel padding between panes like in Rstudio. I don't understand why people prefer this sterile look in IDEs and then provide zero way to change it.

2. I wanted to try it out to get copilot editing capabilities, but the experience was terrible. Chat context immediately lost. No ability to edit whatsoever even when on edit mode.

3. Cairo broke with ggrastr, even though all diagnostics indicated it was fine.

4. There's too many keyboard shortcuts so all of my customs keyboard shortcuts from Rstudio do not work.

5. Rstudio I think defaults to set the current working directory to that in which the .RMD file is open. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to set this up easily in positron.

All of this combined makes it unusable for me. I will have to go back to using rocker for now, because Rstudio for mac is basically completely broken at this point too.

Thank you for your effort and I'll check back in a year to see if it's usable.

[juliasilge]

Thanks for sharing your experience! RStudio is a great choice for R developers and certainly we know many folks prefer to stick with an IDE that may be more aligned with their preferences. In case you do get interested in trying again (or anybody else coming by has questions):

1. Folks who prefer more visual distinction between panes typically decide to customize their IDE via their settings, as described in Consider increasing visual distinction between panes #2720.

2. Certainly sounds like something went wrong! If you are interested in sharing more details, we would be happy to dig into what may have happened.

3. I'm not sure what this means, but if you are able to share a set of reproducible steps that results in your problem, we would be interested in digging into it.

4. You or a similar user may be interested in opting in to the RStudio keyboard shortcuts: https://positron.posit.co/migrate-rstudio-keybindings.html

5. You can change the working directory by right clicking in the Explorer pane and choosing Set as Working Directory in Active Console, or you may be interested in upvoting Working interactively on Quarto document inside an R project with relative paths #6449 where we are tracking more notebook-like support for working directories in .qmd/.Rmd files.

Folks who are considering whether to switch from RStudio to Positron may find our documentation here helpful, outlining some of the things to consider: https://positron.posit.co/migrate-rstudio-compare.html

[david-priest]

Thanks for your reply. Yes it would be great to add more visual distinction between panes as an accessible option. My limited testing has shown that Edit mode is more reliable in VS Code when connected to the same Github account with the education copilot plan. Getting the model to perform edits in Positron was very flaky. I ran into issues with Cairo a while back and thought I had fixed it, but for some reason the issue re-appeared in Positron. Sorry it's hard to reproduce. Thanks, I'll look into keybindings and changing working directory.

It would be cool if Outline view looked similar to rstudio and in the same position. That miniviewer thing is of no use to me. Other QOL tweaks would be welcome like: the position of run chunk button, inline plotting of graphs, green bar to indicate chunk running etc.

Overall, having migrated from Mac version of Rstudio to rocker running Rstudio linux has made for a much more stable experience.

This seemed to work ok for getting plots to copy to the clipboard at the correct size

cp <- function(plot_obj, width = 15, height = 3, units = "in", res = 300) {
f <- tempfile(fileext = ".png")
png(f, width = width, height = height, units = units, res = res)
if (inherits(plot_obj, "Heatmap")) {
draw(plot_obj)
} else if (inherits(plot_obj, "gg")) {
print(plot_obj)
} else {
stop("Unsupported plot type. Use a ComplexHeatmap Heatmap or ggplot object.")
}
dev.off()
cmd <- sprintf("osascript -e 'set the clipboard to (read (POSIX file \"%s\") as {«class PNGf»})'", normalizePath(f, mustWork = FALSE))
system(cmd)
unlink(f)
}

[aljung21]

To add to the pane borders: Give the extension "ThemeTuner" a try. It contains a template for easily adjusting border colour.
It should work for all but some Positron specific GUI elements, which you can add manually. Here are their names and my current values for those elements:

"positronConsole.foreground": "#676767ff",
"positronConsole.background": "#ffffff",
"positronActionBar.border": "#b0b0b0",
"positronActionBar.background": "#ffffff",
"positronActionBar.separator": "#000000",