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Mostafa Gazar
Mostafa Gazar

Posted on • Updated on

Jupyter notebooks tips and tricks

#jupyter #python #productivity #tips

Shortcuts

  • Shift + Enter to run a cell (code or markdown).
  • A to insert a new cell above the current cell.
  • B to insert a new cell below the current cell.
  • M to change the current cell to Markdown
  • Y to change the current cell to code.
  • D + D (twice) to delete the selected cells.

Magic commands

  • Time the execution of a single line of code or the whole cell 
# Run the code multiple times and find mean runtime
%timeit CODE_LINE
%%timeit CODE_CELL

# Run once and report
%time CODE_LINE
%%time CODE_CELL
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  • Use ! prefix to run a single bash command line
  • %%bash to change the current code cell to run to bash mode, basically writing bash commands in there 
%%bash

echo "hello from $BASH"
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  • %%js, %% html, %%latex, %%python2, %%python3, ... run and render code cells in that specified language or format.

  • autoreload IPython extension is exceptionally helpful when you do not want to worry about reloading modules before executing new code. In other words when you change something in a certain module the current notebook uses, changes will take place when you run new code cells without having to worry about anything.

%load_ext autoreload
%autoreload 2
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  • Embedd tensorboard in jupyter notebook 
%load_ext tensorboard

%tensorboard --logdir logs/model_training_logs
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  • Finally you can list all available magics by running %lsmagic, this will show both line and cell magics currently defined.

Other

  • Sometimes you will have this memory hungry variable, you can reclaim memory by setting it to NONE and then forcing gc to run 
some_var = None
gc.collect()
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  • Use sudo service jupyter restart to restart jupyter because every once in a while jupyter would throw a fit and restarting kernels will not be enough to get it back to a responsive state.
  • Add ? before almost any function, variable, ... and run the code cell to access its documentation.
  • tqdm which means "progress" in Arabic (taqadum, تقدّم) is not really related to jupyter notebooks but it can be used to show a smart progress meter. Just by wrapping any iterable with tqdm(iterable) 
from tqdm import tqdm

for i in tqdm(range(10000)):
    pass
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  • When you want to count the number of files in a directory you can run the following command 
!ls DIR_NAME | wc -l
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Classic notebooks extensions

There are many great extensions in jupyter_contrib_nbextensions. You should be using Jupyter lab though instead.

First you need to instead jupyter_contrib_nbextensions and then you can install various useful extensions.

pip install jupyter_contrib_nbextensions
jupyter contrib nbextension install --user
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These are the ones I love:

  • code_prettify backed by autopep8 is great for reformatting code in notebook code cells base on PEP 8 style guide 
pip install autopep8
jupyter nbextension enable code_prettify/autopep8
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  • spellchecker highlights incorrectly spelled words in Markdown cells which saved me from a few embarrassing typos. 
jupyter nbextension enable spellchecker/main
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  • toggle_all_line_numbers as its names suggests it adds a toolbar button to toggle between showing line numbers or not 
jupyter nbextension enable toggle_all_line_numbers/main
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  • varInspector is great for debugging python and R kernels. It displays the values of all defined variables in a floating window 
jupyter nbextension enable varInspector/main
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Themes

  • dunovank/jupyter-themes has one of the best themes I came across. I tried it and then I stopped using it because I switch environments all the time so it was best for me to get used to the stock theme. 
pip install jupyterthemes

# dark
jt -t onedork -fs 95 -altp -tfs 11 -nfs 115 -cellw 88% -T

# light
jt -t grade3 -fs 95 -altp -tfs 11 -nfs 115 -cellw 88% -T

# Restore default theme
jt -r
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Jupyter lab extensions

There are two extensions that I only use at the moment

jupyter labextension install @krassowski/jupyterlab_go_to_definition
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pip install --pre jupyter-lsp
jupyter labextension install @krassowski/jupyterlab-lsp

conda install -c conda-forge python-language-server
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Finally you need to rebuild the jupyter lab app

jupyter lab build
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Themes

There are many themes out there, the first customization plugin in my list is not a theme though. It is a topbar extension to quickly switch between light and dark themes

jupyter labextension install jupyterlab-topbar-extension jupyterlab-theme-toggle
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Here is a list a few themes I used recently

jupyter labextension install @telamonian/theme-darcula
jupyter labextension install @rahlir/theme-gruvbox
jupyter labextension install @kenshohara/theme-nord-extension
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