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Comment by mkl | Hacker News Reader

Do you know how it compares to using Visual Studio Code's debugger with notebooks? I'm wanting to find a notebook debugger recommendation for my students.

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The VSCode debugger works amazing with notebooks. I find it super useful all the time when I develop. Just install the Jupyter extensions and it should work

Vscode's notebook is quite good (as good as you consider it to be in comparison to pycharm), but on my system it always exhibits bugs: 'random' need to rerun code multiple times for the debugger to recognize changes, not terminating debugging session when I stop it, freezing interactive debugger shell in the middle of a session, etc.

Is this in the context of students learning to code, or something else where they need to use the notebooks to supplement their study?

Engineering students (not software) learning numerical methods, so doing programming themselves, but nothing very sophisticated. Their programming skills are mostly pretty limited so simpler is better. At the moment we use plain Jupyter notebooks, but a variable value explorer and simple debugger would be helpful. I want to avoid the (to them) bewildering complexity of an IDE.

Have you tried pyCharm? I believe even community (free) edition should have support You are looking for

No I haven't, but it looks like the community edition can't do notebooks: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/jupyter-notebook-supp...

Ah, my bad then.

If it's for student, you could maybe get educational license, that is completely free for all their products, but I imagine it could be quite a hassle

Pycharm's notebook debugger is top notch, but their notebook implementation is, imo, clunky and slow.

Give it another shot if you haven't recently. I was a hardcore Jupyter Lab user and PyCharm pulled me away with their recent updates. Same hotkeys, good integrated tool support.

The VS Code implementation of notebooks has too much vertical space for me.

I'll try then! Last I remember they had some weird variable loading policy: even under small cell executions there'd be noticable delay before variables got 'refreshed', even when lazy loading was configured. Maybe only a problem on my end though.

The debugging engine is the same. They both use debugpy 'via' the Jupyter wire connection.

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