Exploring Positron settings | Isabel Zimmerman & Davis Vaughan | Data Science Lab
The Data Science Lab is a live weekly call. Register at pos.it/dslab! Discord invites go out each week on lives calls. We'd love to have you! The Lab is an open, messy space for learning and asking questions. Think of it like pair coding with a friend or two. Learn something new, and share what you know to help others grow. On this call, Libby Heeren is joined by Posit engineers Isabel Zimmerman and Davis Vaughan as they share some of their favorite settings in Positron, a super customizable data science IDE. Come laugh with us as we can't seem to figure out that VSCode calls rainbow parentheses "bracket pair colorization" Hosting crew from Posit: Libby Heeren, Isabella Velasquez, Daniel Chen, Isabel Zimmerman, Davis Vaughan Resources from the hosts and chat: Install Positron: https://positron.posit.co/ Positron docs on keyboard shortcuts: https://positron.posit.co/keyboard-shortcuts.html Nathan Jeffery's "click to open a .RDS file" keybinding: https://nathan-jeffery.netlify.app/blog/2025-08-26-read-rds-positron/ Positron R pipe setting (paste in browser and it'll open in Positron): positron://settings/positron.r.pipe One of Dan Chen's faves, the native tab feature in VSCode + Positron: https://lucasprag.com/posts/underrated-vscode-feature-native-tabs/ The list of RStudio keybindings that you get when you turn on RStudio keybindings in Positron: https://positron.posit.co/migrate-rstudio-keybindings.html Indent rainbow extension: https://open-vsx.org/extension/oderwat/indent-rainbow Rainbow brackets setting (paste in browser and it'll open in Positron): positron://settings/editor.bracketPairColorization.enabled Setting hierarchy (User vs Workspace settings) in Positron: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/configure/settings#_settings-precedence Rainbow CSV extension (not by Posit): https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mechatroner.rainbow-csv Positron +1ePositron, an extension pack for dev and data science, by Garrick Aden-Buie: https://open-vsx.org/extension/grrrck/positron-plus-1-e Publishing from VS Code or Positron: https://docs.posit.co/connect/user/publishing-positron-vscode/ Posit Connect Cloud plans: https://connect.posit.cloud/plans Enter Folder extension that Libby mentions: https://open-vsx.org/extension/xiangda/enter-folder Catppuccin themes (shared by Rory Lawless, and now some of Libby's favorites!): https://open-vsx.org/extension/Catppuccin/catppuccin-vsc â–º Subscribe to Our Channel Here: https://bit.ly/2TzgcOu Follow Us Here: Website: https://www.posit.co The Lab: https://pos.it/dslab Hangout: https://pos.it/dsh LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/posit-software Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/posit.co Thanks for learning with us! Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 00:42 Guest Introductions: Isabel and Davis 02:41 Positron Settings overview 04:11 How to enable "Format on Save" 04:34 "How do I open settings in JSON or UI?" 05:10 Auto Save on focus change 08:26 Enabling RStudio key bindings 09:28 "Why doesn't the cursor move with code edits?" 12:18 User vs. Workspace settings 14:34 Creating and using Profiles 16:13 "Can I use the magrittr pipe with Control+Shift+M?" 17:23 Searching and managing keyboard shortcuts 19:42 Creating custom code snippets 21:31 The Indent Rainbow extension 24:04 Enabling rainbow parenthesis/brackets 25:08 Managing Python and R interpreters 26:32 Rearranging and hiding UI panes 28:04 Rainbow CSV and favorite extensions 29:26 Using the Enter Folder extension 31:05 Understanding the setting hierarchy 32:48 Adding symbols to Quick Open search 36:00 "Is there a way to shift focus using keyboard shortcuts?" 38:04 Modifying keybindings JSON for specific languages 39:20 "How do you find trustworthy extensions?" 43:11 "How can I publish to shinyapps.io from Positron?" 44:03 Deploying with Posit Publisher and Connect Cloud 48:32 Customizing themes with RainGlow extension 50:36 "Is there an Import Data Set wizard in Positron?" 53:01 Conclusion and community resources
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Welcome to the Data Science Lab, everybody. My name is Libby. I'm a data community manager here at Posit, and I am joined by two of my co-hosts behind the scenes who you might already know. One is Isabella Velazquez. Isabella, do you want to say hello?
Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us.
And we also have Daniel Chen. Daniel, do you want to say hi?
I am really excited to introduce our featured guests at the lab today, Isabel Zimmerman and Davis Vaughan. They're both software engineers here at Posit working on Positron. Isabel, would you like to introduce yourself?
Sure. So, hello, everyone. I am Isabel Zimmerman. I'm a software engineer on the Positron team. Libby just said all of that. Some other non-Libby facts. I am also, I saw someone from Tampa-ish Florida. I'm also a Tampa-ish Florida person. Losing my voice today. I was at Epic Universe Mario World this weekend. It was amazing. It was everything you want it to be.
I work on a lot of the Python experience on Positron. I also bop around to some UI things. But my main focus is Python. That's because I also run some of the Python packages here at Posit. So, if you're familiar with pins or vetiver in Python, that is some of the things that I have created and maintained. So, super excited to be here with everyone today.
Amazing. Davis, would you like to introduce yourself?
Sure. Hi, everyone. I'm Davis Vaughan. I'm in Charlotte, North Carolina. As Libby said, I'm on the Positron team, but I also do a lot of just R things in general. So, Isabelle is the Python side. I work on the R side. In addition to Positron, I work on things like dplyr and tidyr and a number of other R packages. And I'm the co-creator of air if you're using that for R formatting.
Nice. And we're going to talk about air today, which I'm really excited about.
And I also want to just let everybody know how today will work, because this is new. If you're used to the Data Science Hangout, we talk, we chat with people, we find out about their journey to where they are. We talk about career questions, data science leadership questions, technical questions. Today is going to be all about sharing our screens, walking through stuff, and just being with you all as a community about the technical stuff. Today is going to be all about Positron settings.
So, we are going to talk about what settings we love to replicate stuff that we love in other places or things that help our workflow. And I will get started by just sharing my screen with Positron on it and walking through just some basics.
Exploring the settings UI
Okay, you should see my Positron screen. Does everybody see that? Yes. Davis says yes. I get a thumbs up. Fantastic.
Okay. So, here is my Positron setup with my theme. And this is going to be like the most basic stuff ever for me. I'm going to let Davis and Isabel do the more fun stuff. But I would also really love to know from everybody in the chat what stuff you have questions about. If you have a question for Davis or Isabel, please put it in the Slido. Or what stuff that you are really excited about that you've customized your Positron to include.
I know that Isabel is going to talk about rainbow indention or rainbow parentheses, which I would really love for my own uses. What I would love to talk about is format on save. So, the little search bar up here is not always a search bar, right? Sometimes it is a command shift P palette. This is like a command palette where once you have this little sideways greater than symbol, you can do a ton of stuff inside of Positron. This is where you can do things like your settings. You can open your settings either in JSON or a UI. I'm going to open the UI.
But if you see people doing things in JSON and settings, if you're coming from RStudio and you're like, what are these JSON things? This is where it is. Open user settings JSON. It's just a file with really simple JSON in it that lets you toggle things on and off. And when I open this in the UI, you're going to see some of these same things, right? Here's my theme, community material theme, high contrast. If you happen to like what I have going on here, which is kind of like a Dracula-ish theme.
I have my Positron plots dark filter set to off so it doesn't filter my plots with the same dark filter. And here is my autosave on focus change and then also my format on save true.
Format on save and autosave
So I'm going to do command shift P again and get back to my thing. And I'm going to go to this like open settings UI so that you can see all of those same things. So format on save pulls up our format on save UI settings. I have this toggled on. And so what this does is it tells Positron that anytime I am using R or Python, it's going to use either rough or air to automatically format the stuff that I put in there.
I also have it turned on for notebooks, but I think this is for the main editor like .py, .qmd files. And Davis and Isabel can stop me if I say something wildly wrong. Just hop in and be like, no, you're wrong.
The other thing that I want to turn on in conjunction with this to make this really, really helpful for me is the autosave. All right, so I'm going to search for autosave and then I am going to set this to on focus change. This happens to be what I like. You could do whatever you want. You could turn it off. I don't recommend that one. You can do it after a certain delay and then set the delay, I think, in milliseconds or something. But I like focus change. It says an editor with changes is automatically saved when editor loses focus. That means when I take my cursor out of my editor and put it anywhere else, right?
And when I go back to something like, for example, this and I do something wacky here and I like, let's just say I do this. My focus is in my editor window right now. If I take my focus and I put it somewhere else, it's automatically going to clean up my code for me. It doesn't matter how ridiculous my code looks. And how wild everything is. And it also doesn't matter how big my file is. It's going to happen so fast. The moment my focus leaves this and goes anywhere else, like my console pane, it's going to fix things.
The moment my focus leaves this and goes anywhere else, like my console pane, it's going to fix things.
Oh, look, I love how it like respected the fact that I wanted that on another line, but it didn't fix this. Hilarious. All right, I'm going to save this file. And when I saved it, it fixed it. So it respects some things that you want with style, like if I want things on a separate line, but it'll clean stuff up.
Format unsaved, Renato says, true is a blessing. Yes, absolutely. And Renato also said RStudio key bindings. Great call out. I'm going to go over to settings. And over here, I'm just going to search RStudio. And the first thing that I see is that enable RStudio key bindings. And it does say, hey, this requires a restart. So you might have to restart. But I already have it checked. And that means that when I am working in R, I can do things like I can add a pipe with my pipe shortcut, my command shift M.
And I have also added some things that help me have things more like R. For example, if I do shift enter, I get another comment, which is not normal. And I think that that is like one of my favorite things that I've added as a custom key binding. But we can talk about custom key bindings in just a second.
Audience Q&A: cursor position during formatting
So I'm going to hop over to the Slido and have Javier ask his question live. Javier, would you like to click that yes to unmute button and ask that live?
Hello, can you hear me? Yeah. Hey, thanks. I didn't mean to interrupt you either, Olivia. I'm sorry. Because it's not entirely related to what you're showing right now. That's okay. We're going to hop over.
So basically, I stopped using R only for the reason that I'm continuously control saving on a script or anything I'm working on. And I would like my cursor to move along with the edits. So it does a great job of formatting. Amazing, right? But I was getting frustrated that the code was kind of shifting up and down around my cursor as opposed to moving with the formatted code. I didn't know if that was a setting that maybe I'm missing or, yeah, if that's possible.
What a great question. I have not even, like, thought about this or experienced it. Davis or Isabel, do you have any thoughts on this?
And you're working in R, Javi, right? Yeah. Primarily R, yeah. I'm trying to understand, so I'm just going to share. Let's do it. Exactly what you're getting at here. Like, if I'm here and I hit save, right, for me, that feels like moving with my cursor? Like, what are you, do you have a different example that you know of that, like, doesn't feel like it moves with the cursor?
So mine is, I'm talking more about code edits that happen where not the row is changing necessarily. Like, not the row being formatted, but the overall script is being formatted. Yeah, so if I've got, like, exactly, like a mutate call or, yeah, right, something like this. And I've got comments in between. Where I've seen it happen is where it's, like, much longer scripts.
Maybe I could try replicating it on my end. Sorry. Okay. Yeah, let me try replicating something and I'll just put it in the comments, like, maybe the code. Yeah, we can come back if you find one. Put it into the code junk. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it.
Project-level settings and profiles
So Nathan says he has format on save turned on at the project level because he sometimes opens legacy code and doesn't want to reformat it at all. That is an excellent point. Would anybody like to hop in and talk about project level settings? Isabel, do you want to?
Sure. So when you have settings, here, I can share my screen, perhaps. You can decide if you want it for, like, you as a user, like, that's effectively your whole IDE unless you're using different spaces, which we can talk about if people are interested in making different, like, profiles. Or you can do it for a certain workspace. So you can have something just at a certain project. So maybe for my pins project, I always want it to format on save, but for something else, I don't. We actually use this in the Positron repo because there's a few different formatters in play with all of the different types of code that's happening in this IDE. So, like, when I'm actually building the Python extension, I don't have format on save set. When I'm opening it from one directory, but if I open it directly, I have it open. It does format on save.
It's very customizable, and you can just click between these user and workspace settings, and if you change something, maybe something reasonable, like 16, it should say that, like, you know, it's got this little line that's changed for your user. And if you look at the workspace, now you say, hey, it's modified for the user, but not for this workspace.
I think that profiles are a good thing to talk about. Like, Daniel had mentioned in the Discord chat that Hadley had said in Tidy Dev Day, he has the auto format on save turned off, so he doesn't trigger, like, new line trimming and other changes when he's working on other people's packages. Like, if you're reviewing a PR, you're just, like, changing a ton of lines if you have that on all the time, right? So if you had a profile that was set up for doing PR reviews or, you know, looking at someone else's code versus your own, I think that that would be really helpful.
I am not a profile user, but I know I've talked to people who use profiles, and I know, like, Mina is someone who uses profiles a lot because she has one for teaching. She's a professor. So one for teaching, one for development work. So she'll have all of her the font sizes much larger for teaching or a different setup.
If you go to the gear at the bottom left corner and then click on profiles, you'll get this. And I think you can just click new profile and configure all of your settings. Yeah, I'm not a user, but I've heard people have really interesting use cases, even to have, like, a different theme for different workspaces and things like that.
Okay, so what I have seen people do is set up profiles for the different stuff that they need to do, the different hats they need to wear for their job. So they might have, like, a code review one. They might have one that is set up for analysis for, like, this is what I like to happen during analysis. And then they might have one set up for data engineering. This is what I like this to look like when I'm doing data engineering in Python. I think that that's really exciting.
Pipe operator settings and key bindings
So in your settings, for me, Command-Comma will also bring me right there. You can search for pipe. And thanks to Jenny, there is an option here where you can choose the magrittr pipe if you want to as your default. Nice. Thank you. And yeah, Command-Comma is excellent. Which brings up the same thing as settings, you know, open user settings. Yeah, and it automatically opens the UI, right? Yeah, automatically opens the UI. So Command-Comma goes to the UI.
Yes, and that's a fantastic thing to sort of like share about in general is key bindings. I have a custom key binding, which I don't mind showing everybody. I'll share my screen. But I also just kind of want to show where you can find key bindings. So I'm going to again do my Command-Shift-P to get to my command palette. And then I'm going to just type the word keyboard. The command palette inside of Positron is smart. You don't have to type in like developer toggle keyboard shortcuts troubleshooting, right? You could just type in keyboard. It's going to find everything that might be that. And then I'm going to open the keyboard shortcuts. This is the UI. This is the JSON. I'm just going to open the UI for right now.
And I'm going to show you how you can sort of search this. So this search bar up here is looking for a string. It's looking for something like Shift-Plus-Enter, right, which is going to pull up all the Shift-Enters. But you can also just type in the shortcut that you're looking for. And I think that that's this one. So you press this little keyboard button, and it says recording keys, and it's listening now. So I can hit Shift-Enter, and it's going to put in Shift-Enter and find all of the key bindings that are mapped to Shift-Enter. If you are an RStudio user, this might look a little foreign to you. That's okay.
One important thing to note is this when clause right here. I will show you what this looks like in JSON. But there's a when clause inside of each of these key bindings that tells Positron when to use this key binding, right? So, for example, all of these Shift-Enters, there are so many of them. There's so many of them. They don't step on each other because of this when clause.
And if you want to see mine, see it says user right there? All of these are from the system. These are from the installed things that I have, like Quarto, Python, Jupyter. But this user one is mine. It's a snippet. And it's when the editor text is in focus and when the editor is R. So I don't have this turned on for when I'm using Python. I wanted it to replicate RStudio.
So let's go to the JSON version. And this is where my snippet lives. So you can see what my snippet looks like. And if you use R, it kind of looks like an RStudio code snippet as well. So I want it to use Shift-Enter. I want it to do the action called insert snippet. This is my when clause. I want it to be when the editor language is R and when the editor text is in focus. When that happens and I click Shift-Enter, I want it to enter a new line and a hash symbol so that I am ready to type my next comment because I relied on that function in RStudio for so long I can't live without it.
Isabel's favorite settings: rainbow indent and interpreter management
So I use rainbow tabs. I think I said rainbow parentheses but it's so large now. The spaces, right? The space tabs. Yep. So if you can see, I don't know how good the contrast is for y'all, but you can see this is, like, vaguely yellow, vaguely green, vaguely pink. And so it just helps, you know, as you're getting some, like, nested, like, really just adds some readability, especially when you're looking at a lot of different code. So this is actually an extension. It's called indent rainbow. You do indent rainbow. So it's this one by Odorwat is the creator. It's available on VSIX or OpenVSX. So this is what I like to use for especially writing Python code.
Oh, I know I just put in the Discord a URL for any setting. If you click on the little gear next to it, you can copy the setting as a URL and share it with your friends. Oh, my gosh. I did not know that. Can you show that one more time? Yeah. So any setting, if you don't want to, like, screenshot it or, like, tell people look at this in the settings, as long as somebody has Positron installed, it'll look something like this. And I like that you can copy it as JSON, too. Yes. That is very convenient. You can even get the setting ID, and that's a really easy way to get people directly to the setting that you want.
You can even get the setting ID, and that's a really easy way to get people directly to the setting that you want.
Oh, my gosh. This is so helpful. Joey's also a little mind blown. I love it. So you click on the gear. Correct. There's a lot of helpful things in this little gear. If you're a profile user, I just realized you can apply it to all profiles as well. So you've got some options there.
I am somebody who tends to collect a lot of pythons. If you are like me and have a million different places, there's a python on your computer, you can see I've got so many pyens. I've got some globals. I've got some UV. This is actually the cleaned up version if you think this is a lot of interpreters. I actually use something that's python interpreters exclude. This is in R as well. I hide from my dropdown everything that's in user, anything that's in my home.local. Or if you have maybe an R installed in a weird location and it's not being found or python, you can add items here. You can just add paths.
This is amazing. This solves a problem that I had for so long. Okay. This is fantastic. So it's python or R interpreters include. So yeah, interpreters include, exclude. They're there. So if we're not finding your interpreters the way you want, you can customize that as well.
I think one other thing that's just general customization. I tend to move things around a lot. I really like putting my terminal over here. Sometimes. Sometimes I don't. So I guess just a call out to know that you can rearrange all of these little pieces and put it wherever you want. And she's also clicking and dragging, by the way, everybody. Correct.
You can also right click on these different panes and hide or show different icons, which I think I did not realize. And the day I did, I hit so many things from my sidebar. Yeah. You can also move that sidebar to the top, too, if you really want. There are all kinds of view things that you can do. So you can move your primary bar wherever you want it. And then also, if you're really into hiding stuff, you can just hit command shift P. And I'll share my screen really quickly and show you what this looks like.
So wherever you are, like I'm going to head back over to just a QMD file. You can do command shift P then and have it all go away, which I sometimes really like if I just want to look at code. And then you can hop back, you know, command shift P your way there. And that's really, really helpful.
Extensions: finding trustworthy ones
Edward Clayton says extension Rainbow CSV is necessary. Okay, fantastic. I'm going to go explore Rainbow CSV.
Nathan says agree to the Rainbow CSV extension. An extension that I really like, because the file pane is not always like my favorite thing. Is the enter folder one. How's this enter folder right there? I can open a folder and have it be the only thing that I see, and then I can go back. And so that is the enter folder extension.
This one, it's like a yellow folder with an enter button. I really enjoy that because I want to be able to just get into one thing and look at it. Especially when I have really busy folders.
Okay. Back to Slido. I'm going to mark some stuff as answered, so they might disappear. Nathan, you had a question. Do you want to unmute and ask that one live? It was about the user level, project level settings, because I think it's important.
Yeah, I think Jenny sent, no, Isabel sent a link to the setting hierarchy. So you can kind of think of it as like a funnel, and the most granular settings are going to be put at the top of the hierarchy. So if you have something at the workspace, it's going to go over, like, your user. Your user is going to go over, like, the default. And there's also, I did put the link in chat for folks. So the more granular the setting level, it will be put on the top. So user top. Workspaces underneath user. Workspace would go above user. So if you think of user as all of your settings for all of your positron, and then a workspace would be your settings for just one folder or something like that.
The way I think about it is, like, the actual file for those workspace settings is closer to the code that it actually, like, has an effect on. And so, like, the workspace settings are closer to the actual project that you're working on. So they override any user settings, which are further away. Oh, yes. That makes perfect sense. So it's not like my user has all of these workspaces underneath it, and all of those are going to use the user. It's more like this is what I want if I don't tell you what to do in your workspace. But then in the workspace, if I tell you what to do, override my user settings. Exactly.
Davis's tip: quick open with symbols
So in RStudio, there's this, like, find function slash file type of shortcut that I used all the time. And in Positron, like, for a long time, I was like, I miss this thing. Like, how do I get this? What was the RStudio shortcut? Control dot. Control dot on my Mac would be, like, go to file slash function. And let me show you, like, what it looks like in dplyr. So, like, in dplyr, if I hit control dot, there's a file called arrange, and that would be arrange.r here. But it also lists, like, functions in the project. So if I wanted to go to the function arrange rows, like, everything is just listed together so I can jump straight to arrange rows. And I jump around a lot when, like, I'm working on an R package.
So over here in Positron and dplyr, like, if I did the same thing with, like, command P and I just started typing in arrange, like, the default is just to show you files. But I really missed the symbols. Like, to get the symbols, you would have to do, like, the hash symbol, and then you could type in arrange. And I could never remember this. Like, I always just hit command P and expect it to work. There's a setting called search, quick open, include symbols. And we can post this in a second. And if you set that to true, then it works much more like RStudio, where if I hit just, again, command P now and type in arrange, it includes both the file and the symbols. So if I want to jump to arrange rows, I can jump straight to it. So this, for me, was, like, a game changer. And, like, I totally missed this from RStudio and was super sad that I could not find this.
There's a setting called search, quick open, include symbols. And if you set that to true, then it works much more like RStudio, where if I hit just, again, command P now and type in arrange, it includes both the file and the symbols.
Focus shifting and keyboard shortcut customization
So in RStudio, control 1 in the console, control 2 in the terminal or function F12, like, next tab or script. Is there a way to do that focus shifting inside of Positron? Davis or Isabella, do you know? Because I do not know.
I can say a little bit. I'm going to start and then you can add anything extra. So if you do add, like, RStudio key binding setting, this is the list of things that, like, you get from adding that setting. I'm saying, like, I want to use RStudio key bindings. Yeah, there it is. If you do control 1, it focuses on, like, the code. If you do control 2, it focuses on the console. So if that's what you're looking for, that does exist if you opt in to the RStudio key binding settings.
Perfect. That's extremely helpful. I don't know if that exists for Python. I like being able to turn it on for RStudio. I wonder if you turn on those key bindings in RStudio. I think that they all have the win clause, sort of, of, like, applying only to the R language. But I bet you could go modify that to include Python, maybe. That was going to be my recommendation. I just would probably reverse engineer all of the keyboard shortcuts you want from RStudio. And you can just put lang equals Python. And it's Python all lowercase.
Yeah. So, like, I have my little key bindings.json. It just has my snippet in it. Is there a way for me to go see what the JSON is for those other key bindings in the UI? There is a command. I believe there's a command shift P to do keyboard shortcuts and, like, open. Yeah. Do command shift P. Oh, I found it. Yeah. It's, like, open keyboard shortcuts JSON. Okay. So, I did command shift P. And then, again, I just typed in keyboard. But instead of the one that was the toggle keyboard shortcuts or whatever it was, it was this default keyboard shortcuts JSON. And that opened this, which gives you all of the, like, key combination, what the command is, the when clause for it.
And so, what we were looking at was all those RStudio ones probably have a something just like this where it's, like, editor lang equals R or equals equals R. This could just be added to something to be equals equals Python. So, you can reverse engineer a lot of those things.
Finding trustworthy extensions
So, Rory said, how do you find trustworthy and reliable extensions? There are an overwhelming number in the marketplace, and it's hard to know which ones to use. While we were talking about this, I will just hop over here, and, like, we'll go look at the enter folder one. It can be really nerve wracking. So, when you click install, which, like, if you have a brand new one, it just says install, it's going to ask you questions usually that are, like, do you trust this author? And you're going to say, I have no idea who this author is.
And I think that Jenny might have put in the chat that, like, it's vibes. I don't have any way to, like, go look at this person and know. I'm going to go install this one. It will give me the question. Do you trust the publisher, Mecca Troner? I don't know. This might be a perfectly trustworthy person. I'm going to say trust publisher and install. But, like, if you want to learn more, it's just going to open up the security policy. It doesn't give you more info on this person. But there are other things that you can look at, right? And you can usually go find their GitHub repo and stuff like that. You can look at their changelog. You can look to see whether or not this is, like, a maintained thing. This clearly has lots of versions and lots of, like, version notes in the changelog. It has a well fleshed out, like, list of commands. That stuff all makes me feel better.
In terms of, like, well, just one other thing to, like, make you feel better, right? Like, I always look at the download count for sure. I mean, if it's over 20,000 or something, it's probably one that's fine. Yeah. And then you mentioned the GitHub link. Like, if you scroll down in this marketplace section, the repository link is, like, almost always here. And then, you know, that will take you straight to GitHub. You can kind of see, look at the star count. See, like, is it active? Does it seem scary? You can look at extensions. Look for people that you know as well. So a lot of our repositron devs actually have made extensions. And, like, they, like, Sam made one that's also sort of, like, a folder one. So you can look for names that you might trust.
So I work a bit with the Shiny engineering team. And Garrick hosts. He has a extension pack of all the stuff that he uses. And he sort of collected it all together into one giant extension pack. I put it in Discord. I'll put it in Zoom chat as well. But, yeah, it's just a big collection of other packages that he uses. So I'll just make a plug for that.
Publishing to Connect Cloud from Positron
Well, while we are talking about extensions that do very important things, I would love to talk about Publisher. This is something that I don't use. But we had a question. We had an anonymous question in the Slido that was, how do people publish to shinyapps.io from Positron? I do all of my code editing in Positron but end up closing the folder I was working on in Positron and then opening that folder project in our studio only to do this since it isn't built in to Positron.
I have switched away from shinyapps.io to Posit Connect Cloud. I do things in the Posit Connect Cloud UI, which means I log into it, I give it the repo, I create a manifest, I give it the manifest, and then every time I just push changes to my repo that contains my app, my app is automatically updated and I don't even think about publishing anymore. I just push changes to my repo and my app is immediately updated.
I do use Publisher. I don't know if it supports shinyapps.io. I do know that it works with Connect Cloud. I can really quickly share. This is not a super good example because it is a Python package. But you can select, like, create a new deployment. We'll say we're deploying this. And then I previously did, like, a single sign-on, like, one click. Authorize to Connect Cloud. And then it will automatically slurp up a lot of information. Obviously, it's not a good example. But you can click just deploy your project right here. And then on follow-up, like, applications for, like, Stringlet or Dash or Shiny and all of those, you get your little one click. It's this exact same icon in all of your Python files. It also will know things like what Python packages you're using. And it does a lot of really cool sniffing. So I also don't feel like I have to think about publishing really at all. I just kind of click my buttons and things magically appear on Connect Cloud.
And if you want to know where we are looking for this publisher, you can go to your extensions and look up publisher. It's this one right here, Posit Publisher by Posit Software PBC. Nice and trustworthy.
Theming
And Marlene had said, is anybody using their Rain Glow extension? And Nick says that he is also using it. So why don't we talk about themes for a second? Isabel, I know you have lots of, like, theme stuff set up. Do you change your themes frequently, or do you stick to a light theme?
I am always a light theme person. But I don't have any installed right now, just because working on Positron, we tend to, like, clear our state and get a fresh slate frequently. But there's an arctic blue bearded something like that, any of the bearded themes I'm obsessed with. There's a good blueberry one. Those are my top recommendations.
Okay, excellent. Well, I searched Rain Glow so that you can see Rain Glow colors. And I will install this. And then it popped up to select a color theme right now. And before you click anything, whenever you do this, whenever you see themes inside of this dropdown, I would recommend just using your arrows. Like, it's going to cycle through all of these for you. I'm always a contrast person. I have low contrast vision, which makes it very hard for me to distinguish like colors from each other.
Import data set wizard and wrapping up
Marlene says, I miss the import data set wizard from RStudio. Davis and Isabel, do you have any words of wisdom for import data set wizard type stuff from RStudio in Positron?
There is an issue. I'll put it in the Slack right now. That was going to be my call out. Give it a thumbs up. It's 5515. So it's a fantastic number. So if you're interested in this data import wizard, we do look at top voted issues when we are prioritizing things. Give it a thumbs up.
I was finally allowed to unmute. Hey, I was like, I was like, I felt like I was trapped. I'm like, I have something to say. Oh, this is Jenny. Yeah, we haven't done this yet. The closest thing that does exist is convert to code in the data explorer, which brings up a whole new thing that we haven't gotten into, nor do we have time to, but yeah, it's on the to-do list. But it just hasn't happened yet.
The GitHub, by the way, for everybody, is like the best place to go to keep track of what we're doing, of like what is getting added. And if you find an issue for a feature, go put a thumbs up on it, right? Like that gives us our best view into like what is important to people. Today was really, really fun. This is going to end up on YouTube so other people can watch it.
Please feel free to hang out on the Discord. The Discord is going to be a place as we move forward where you know that anything you ask, you're asking a bunch of data people and like nobody else. Like if you put it out into Twitter, it might go nowhere, right? But everybody here will be data scientists, and they will engage with you and answer your questions.
Also, we're going to have more of these because this was so fun. This was an experiment. We're going to do them maybe weekly, maybe biweekly. I know we have a bunch of holidays coming up, so that will put a cramp in some things. But you can look forward to 2026 being a little bit more stable for us, and we will do things again like this settings. We'll do Q&As. We'll do sharing silly projects. Davis, thank you so much for hanging out with us. Isabel, thank you so much for hanging out with us. Would you like to say goodbye to everybody? It was great to see you all. Thanks for joining. Thanks for coming, yeah.
