JupyterLab is Here: First Impressions

JupyterLab
JupyterLab

JupyterLab

JupyterLab, the next-generation web-based user interface for Python and R from Project Jupyter. It is still a beta release, but stable for daily use. One of the cool features of JupyterLab is that it is the go to browser based app for classic Jupyter Notebook, file browser for your computer files, text editor and a terminal for you. The plan from Project Jupyter’s plan is to replace the classic Jupyter Notebook with Jupyter Lab when it is mature and reaches version 1.0.

How to Install JupyterLab using conda?

conda install -c conda-forge jupyterlab

How to Install JupyterLab using pip?

pip install jupyterlab

How to Launch JupyterLab from terminal?

jupyter lab

If you don’t want to launch JupyterLab from terminal, you can launch JupyterLab from Anaconda-Navigator if you use Anaconda.

I have Jupyter Notebooks for Python and R Markdown for R. With the cool new features of JupyterLab, would like to test out JupyterLab for both Python and R. JupyterLab looks really cool at the first impression. I could easily launch it from the terminal by typing “jupyter lab”. Voila! it opened a tab on the Chrome browser on my Macbook.

One of the cool things JupyterLab did was that it automatically recognized that I have multiple versions of Python (2.7 and 3) and multiple virtual enviornments of Python. And JupyterLab made each of these available on both as notebooks and as IPython consoles. I was pretty impressed by that as I was initially worried about it when I installed JupyterLab from conda. One thing I still need to fiddle with is the icons for my different Python versions and virtual environment looks funky. I need to figure out the reason for it. However, both notebook and consoles work fine.

If you don’t want to install, but just tryout the features of JupyterLab, you can use
Binder: JupyterLab Demo on your browser.

Can’t wait to try out other cool new features of JupyterLab.

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