What’s New in R: July 27, 2026
Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring a video tour of Positron's settings, a look at whether AI is flooding CRAN with new packages, and a slick way to launch your projects in Positron with Raycast. Let's dive in!
Exploring Positron settings
In this video, Isabel Zimmerman and Davis Vaughan walk through a range of settings you can use to customize your experience in Positron. Being able to tailor the editor to how you actually work is one of the things I particularly like about Positron, and this is a great tour of what's on offer. If you've made the switch (or are thinking about it) and want to make Positron feel like your own, this is well worth a watch.
New CRAN Packages: signal or noise?
Joseph Rickert digs into the sharp rise in packages being submitted to CRAN and asks whether all that growth is actually good for the R community. As AI makes it easier than ever to write code, monthly submissions have skyrocketed, to the point where curating R Works' Top 40 list has gone from a pleasant afternoon's work to an overwhelming task. He raises real quality concerns, too: in May alone, 40 of 323 new packages shipped with no README, no vignettes, and no URL. It's a thoughtful take on whether ease of submission is creating more noise than signal, and it's a question I suspect we'll be grappling with for a while.
Launch a Project in Positron with Raycast
Stephen Turner shares a workflow for opening your R projects in Positron using Raycast, the Mac launcher (which I use and love myself). By pairing Raycast with Positron's Project Manager extension, you can hit a keyboard shortcut, type a quick alias, pick a project, and have it open in Positron, all without hunting through folders. If you juggle a lot of different projects, this is a really nice way to jump between them fast. He credits Andrew Heiss for the approach, and the setup only takes a few minutes.
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Got any ideas for resources I should feature in future issues of What’s New in R? Leave a comment below!
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