Comment by anewhnaccount2
18 hours ago
So the main news is that they're giving up on develping an independent IDE and turning into another VS code fork. The loss of biodiversity and reliance on a no-so-reliable steward is mildly concerning.
18 hours ago
So the main news is that they're giving up on develping an independent IDE and turning into another VS code fork. The loss of biodiversity and reliance on a no-so-reliable steward is mildly concerning.
They (reps? devs? I don't remember) have recently mentioned that they won't give up on RStudio, that it will stay separate from Positron. I really hope that stays true.
OTOH, posit funds a lot of development of important packages in the tidyverse and does a lot of community work etc.
So if maintaining RStudio is so much of a burden that it impedes the rest of their work, I don't think it's a bad idea to reduce the amount of work spent trying to compete with VSCode when that's an increasingly tough sell.
I'm not a fan of VSCode personally, but would probably be happy with a tmux setup with a console for R and some minimal output viewer, so people like me should be able to cobble something together that's a workable alternative to Posit.
> so people like me should be able to cobble something together that's a workable alternative to Posit.
There is Rkward[1], available from the repositories in many linux distributions.
Discovered it recently, because I'm currently learning R, and few linux distributions outside the Mandriva family offer Rstudio straight from the repositories, and I'm lazy to download and do a manual install every time.
[1] https://rkward.kde.org/
For many years, Emacs plus ESS was the standard workflow for R users. Vim users have their own plugin. On Windows, Tinn-R was impressive, and last I checked it was still going. Of course there is also Jupyter, PyCharm, and Eclipse, plus every text editor has support for R. If something were to happen to RStudio, there would be many fine alternatives for R.
It feels like when Opera dropped its own web engine, Presto, to become just another Chrome clone.