Install Positron

This lesson is called Install Positron, part of the Getting Started With R course. This lesson is called Install Positron, part of the Getting Started With R course.

Transcript

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Your Turn

Download and install Positron

Learn More

To learn more about Positron, check out:

If you have used the older editor RStudio and are interested in how it compares to Positron, check out this comparison from Posit as well as this blog post I wrote on the Pros and Cons of Positron.

There are many settings you can adjust within Positron. This article by Christopher Kenny gives you a sense of some of them.

In the video I show the VS Code Themes website. All of these themes work in Positron. Positron is what's known as a fork (i.e. a slightly different version) of the very popular VS Code editor so almost all extensions that work in VS Code will work in Positron too.

If you want to learn more about Quarto, here are a couple of resources:

The Quarto documentation website is a great place to start learning about Quarto. I also recommend the book, Quarto: The Practical Guide by Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel and Charlotte Wickham.

Have any questions? Put them below and we will help you out!

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Gwynne Morrissey • September 23, 2026

I downloaded Positron months ago and started Getting Started with R. Today I opened it up again, it updated, and now it tells me in the Console "There is no session running. Use Start Session to start one." When I click on Start Session and put my cursor in that field, nothing pops up to choose from. I see my "getting-started-positron-main" folder in the upper right corner. I see my import.R code (from getting through lesson 7 in the last couple months) in the viewer above the Console. Not sure where to go from here.

In addition, there's a warning in the bottom right that says "Extension host terminated unexpectedly 3 times within the last 5 minutes" and my button options are Start Extension Bisect, Restart Extension Host, and Learn More. No idea what to do!

Gracielle Higino Coach • September 23, 2026

Hi Gwynne! Can you tell us which version of Positron you're using and which operating system? This is likely a bug similar to this one, and apparently reinstalling Positron manually might fix the problem.