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Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

I use Jupyter inside VS Code -- the Jupyter interface inside VS Code has a nicer UI and is very polished (supports black reformatting, refactoring, step debugging, etc.).

Haven't gone back to vanilla Jupyter or JupyterLab in the browser for years.

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For me, I find I need both JupyterLab and the VSCode Jupyter extension. The vscode extension is superior for step-by-step debugging especially with integrated REPL console. However, I notice running cells in vscode is several magnitudes slower than executing the same cells in a JupyterLab session. Also I use several JupyterLab extensions such as citation manager, mathjax 3, etc and custom kernels utilising docker/GPUs etc. I'm not sure how to use these in vscode and also I'm not a fan of vscode's use of Katex over mathjax 3.

I find VS Code's UI for notebooks to be clunky. Each cell is way too large and it's cluttered with buttons that only show up with mouse-over.

Another issue is if you use vim key maps, Jupyter allows it in editor but vim mapping off automatically in notebooks.

Have you seen Python Interactive? There are no separate editors for each cell, but you edit a single file and use #%% to define the boundaries between cells. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/jupyter-support-py

I could never figure out a good use of JupyterLab over regular Jupyter notebooks mainly because of compatibility reasons. Still it is good that they are making progress.

Over the last 5 years I've gone:

* Anaconda install of Jupyter Notebooks (until the license change)

* running JupyterHub server for my organization

* PyCharm

* VSCode

VS Code has made fantastic progress in the last few years for Jupyter Notebook support. Integrated with Copilot it is scarily productive.

At the same time for teaching non-technical audiences it is hard to beat Google Colab for availability(mybinder.org type solutions are generally more brittle).

I agree with the comments about bigger notebooks getting slower.

But I'm not sure it's enough of a hit to outweigh the other productivity gains I get, which are myriad. With vscode, I get vim emulation in Jupyter notebooks that actually works. I get better autoformatting options, and linting of notebook code. And I get a proper programmer's editor for working with *.py files. And that's just my greatest hits list.

Vscode offers such an improved experience. Once you discover that autocomplete can take a millisecond instead of 5 seconds its pretty hard to go back.

I have tried VS Code for notebooks, but for the life of me I am not able to get an interpreter console attached to the same kernel running the notebook, and for me that's a no-go. I usually use the console as the way to test things/syntax easily, and then move that to the notebook.

I am also mostly using VSCode for Notebooks however one big downside is the performance goes down the drain when the notebooks are large in size (i.e. Contains images, plots).

The cell execution speed drastically (up to 10x) slows down w.r.t. Notebook file size. Still looking for a solution to this problem.

The biggest block for me to use Jupyter in VSCode is because it’s support for Jupyter environments in docker is a huge pain.

The only case where this setup does not cut it is when you wish to use the notebook as slides for a presentation.

It has better auto completion. Not better interface.

black has an optional jupyter component that lets it format notebooks with

  pip install "black[jupyter]"

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