20 Bye RStudio, welcome Positron
To be fair, I would’ve preferred the title to be Bye RStudio, welcome Neovim. Yes, I edit my code in a command line, and you could too. Yes, I know it’s not the first thing that comes to mind for beginners, but I wanted to mention it in case you’re curious. Anyway, if you were using something like RStudio and want a better data science experience, here you’re going to join me in this journey where we learn together how to use Positron.
20.1 Elevator pitch
Positron is a code editor made by the same people who developed RStudio. They’re trying to build a more general code editor for data science, similar to Visual Studio Code, if you even know about that one. Why move away from RStudio you say? I don’t know! I’m going to trust these folks, and you should give them a chance too. If you’re completely against the idea and want to keep using RStudio, you’ll have to fill some gaps by yourself in this guide.
We need to start, of course, by installing this Positron thing.
If you’re a Windows enjoyer user and you have one of those work computers that don’t let you install anything without asking for an admin password that takes 17 weeks to get, choose user level install. User level installations don’t require an admin password. Let’s thank every developer that invests their precious time in making their app installable without admin rights.
20.2 You’re the commander
You’ll somehow learn how to use this code editor. No big deal. For now I just want to show you one thing. You press the keys ctrl shift p to get a small menu with “commands”. You can run many different things from here. I think it’s the easiest way to do it. We might use that a few times in the guide. It’s also helpful for me because that way I won’t have headaches trying to find out where that specific command appears in the interface. Just write the description of the command and it will appear. Here, an example:
