With the public beta release of Positron, I have some Posit Workbench users interested to know what is planned for this software and for Posit Workbench. Especially given that VS Code is already available on Posit Workbench and Positron is closely related to VS Code.
Is there a current intention/roadmap/timeline for when Positron may become available on Posit Workbench, if at all?
If Positron becomes available on Posit Workbench, will VS Code still be available alongside it or will Workbench support for VS Code be removed and replaced entirely by Positron?
I just created the positron tag and added it to your thread, so we're all set on that front.
As far as your more important questions, I'll forward this onto our product managers, as I don't know what plans have been shared/timing of sharing with the public.
Howdy @keithn -- I'm the Product Manager for Workbench and Positron, happy to chat more with your team. Feel free to reach out by email and we can setup a call to discuss specific features your team may be interested in. My email is thomas at posit.co
We have been actively working on Positron support in Workbench, and we plan to have Preview support for Positron sessions in 2024. There isn't any change in licensing needed, your team would just need to upgrade to the latest version of Workbench.
VS Code sessions will still be supported on Workbench. We are not planning on deprecating that IDE. In fact, we have just overhauled it in the 2024.04 and upcoming 2024.07 releases as we prepared for Positron. We switched to our own maintained fork of Code OSS for VS Code sessions on Workbench, which serves as the base for Positron support. See: RStudio IDE and Posit Workbench 2024.04.0: What’s New - Posit for more information
I do expect that over time, some Posit Workbench customers will start to favor Positron over VS Code sessions given it is tailor-made for Data Science and will thus have additional features and workflows for data analysis, model development, application and API building, etc in both desktop and on Workbench that VS Code doesn't. Workbench is configurable so that you can choose to either enable or disable access to specific IDEs at your own discretion.