H2O Member | Fri Jun 19, 2020 | 10:55 PM | Likes: 3 

Jupyter Notebook - A Must-Have Editor for Those Who are Both Programmers and Educators

Categories: Tech | Pubby Cash Received:  10 |

In this article titled "Sublime Text vs. Pycharm, Which One is Better?", I mentioned Jupyter Notebook as one of well-known Python IDEs. I do see a number of YouTubers use it for demonstration and education purposes, and thought it is cool and practical to use during learning and teaching. However, I think it cannot replace Sublime Text for development of a series of complicated and connected coding files. The reason Jupyter Notebook is superior for education is that it is featured with multiple interactive code blocks that can be easily added or deleted. You can run one single code block or multiple code blocks to see the results instantaneously without executing the whole py file. The shortcuts are just like other editors: ctrl z for undo, ctrl / for comment, and the like, and you can edit those if you want. Of course, Jupyter Notebook also has downsides. I summarized two, and now only have one left. The No. 1 downside I had before was the default white background appearance, as I prefer a dark theme. It is now no longer a downside, as I've figured out how to change to a dark theme manually. The other downside is it runs on a terminal window just like a web application built on flask, and actually uses two of your computer resources simultaneously: a browser window + a terminal window. For some old computers, it will not be running as fast as Sublime Text, because Sublime Text is an editor stands on its own. It does not need you to run in command line unless you want to test the code you've written. However, as an educator and researcher, I would use Jupyter Notebook as well to produce some reproducible code snippets and save as .ipynb files for future references. With that said, here are some instructions for you to install Jupyter Notebook and apply a dark theme as I did. Open a terminal window, enter: pip install notebook pip install jupyterthemes jupyter notebook In a Jupyter Notebook code block, enter !jt -t monokai Note: "monokai" is the name of a dark theme I'm using. Restart Jupyter Notebook in the command line, and the dark theme is ready to go.