Why
The missing piece
Quarto’s premise is that code, analysis and writing belong in one artifact, Markdown which can be used to reproduce results and be versioned. What has been missing is the other half: several people in the same document at once, comments where the words are, no one waiting for a render or a pull request. Hub adds that half without giving up the critical underlying plain-text, code-first ethos.
Today
What works today
Websites and docs
The whole project: file tree, outline, every page rendered as you edit it.
Slides
revealjs decks, edited and previewed in place. Your co-presenter gets the link, not a PDF. Edit together and even present from a common version.
Meeting notes
One .qmd the whole team types into during the call. It’s rendered as the discussion is happening and available for reference or comment later.
Agents
Point your favorite LLM at the project. It edits the same files you do, and every change stays in the history.
Invite only
Access
Anyone with a project link can open the project, read it, and comment. They don’t need an account or a Quarto install. You sign in to create and own projects.
Note that quarto-hub.com, the experimental service, is currently available by invite only.
Coming soon
Next
Hosted code execution
R, Python, and Julia cells currently run in the author’s local Quarto 2 environment. Later releases will add remote execution, so cells run without anything installed locally.
Positron
Open the Hub project in Positron. Your edits and the browser’s will work seamlessly in the same document. Use the best interface for you.
Hub is built so that whoever has the project open, a teammate, an agent, or you in a different editor, is working on the same source with the same history.
Built on Quarto 2
The engine underneath
Rendering on every keystroke requires a much faster version of Quarto. That is Quarto 2: the engine rewritten in Rust, more than an order of magnitude faster than Quarto 1, and small enough to run inside the browser tab. You don’t need to install anything to use Quarto 2 in Hub; it’s already there.
Quarto 2 is highly functional but still experimental. It is the future of Quarto but Quarto 1/quarto-cli will be supported for many years to come. Over time more of what you use for your daily work will be available in Quarto 2, and we hope the significant improvements in performance, improved errors with stricter parsing, and a source-mapped document model that editors, tools, and agents can build on prove worth transitioning to.
Quarto Hub
The web based editor and file hosting for your collaborative .qmds. Where you work on a project.
Quarto 2
The engine. Runs natively and in the browser. Experimental today; it is where Quarto is going. Follow the project on GitHub.
quarto-cli
Quarto 1. Still supported, still what you install today for production work.