Jupyter Already Has a Perfect Text Editor: This is How You Can Configure It
How to get a VS Code-like experience in Jupyter with a great text editor
This article is the second part of a series. Check out the full series: Part I, Part III, Part IV.
Our previous article stated that many engineers do not consider JupyterLab a complete IDE. One of the main reasons is that JupyterLab does not have a powerful text editor like VS Code or Sublime Text.
JupyterLab allows users to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text. It’s the perfect tool for this kind of interactive work. However, the truth is that its text editor is as primitive as Windows Notepad; you can write code, but the experience is far from ideal.
Can we do something about this? We would love a Docker image that we can run anytime on any machine and have our workspace ready to go. It’s not easy to achieve this with VS Code, except if you’re willing to pay. But JupyterLab is free; it has a vibrant community, and if we could take the best of both worlds, we would have built a free, powerful, and portable workspace.
Let’s take a step back and look at JupyterLab as a platform, not an IDE. JupyterLab has a terminal emulator. That means…
