Provide R language server support to allow a polyglot notebook

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
jupyter-notebook, python, r
Domain
developer-experience, tooling

Research direction

Start by reproducing the rpy2 Python-kernel workflow in a Positron notebook and compare it with the existing Reticulate-kernel approach mentioned in the issue. Determine the integration points needed for R-cell completion, linting, and formatting; done should include those language-server features working for R code executed through the notebook.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

area: notebooks-jupyter enhancement notebooks-roadmap

System details:

Positron and OS details:

Positron Version: 2025.10.0 (system setup) build 131
Code - OSS Version: 1.103.0
Commit: d9f3047f74ac2d01186b19efdbf9afaa6f115316
Date: 2025-09-25T07:33:32.940Z
Electron: 37.2.3
Chromium: 138.0.7204.100
Node.js: 22.17.0
V8: 13.8.500258-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26220

Session details:

R 4.4.3 and Python 3.12.10
rpy2 3.6.3

Describe the issue:

I just recently found that using rpy2 package, similar to reticulate, we can run R code in a Python kernel

Image

Steps to reproduce the issue:

  1. Install rpy2 package: pip install rpy2
  2. Provide path to R installation (optional, as I see some tutorials don't require it)
import os
os.environ['R_HOME'] = 'C:/Program Files/R/R-4.4.2'
%load_ext rpy2.ipython
  1. Write some R code in a cell by starting the cell with %%R
%%R
library(tidyverse)

data(mpg)
glimpse(mpg)
ggplot(mpg, aes(x=displ, y=hwy, color=fl)) +
  geom_point() +
  theme_minimal() +
  labs(title="Engine Displacement vs. Highway MPG",
       x="Engine Displacement (L)",
       y="Highway Miles per Gallon") +
  theme(legend.position="bottom")

Expected or desired behavior:

The code ran successfully. There is also syntax highlighting for code, but there is no code completion, linting, format, etc.

P/S: How should we leverage the Python Reticulate kernel to ease the process, given that there is still very little usage case of Reticulate kernel

Dominant language
TypeScript
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Merged PRs (30d)
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