How to work faster in jupyter notebooks — the answer is Keyboard shortcuts.
Keyboard shortcuts are a great way to do digital work faster, when it comes to programming it’s more relevant. With this article, I am sharing some of my daily keyboard shortcuts while using jupyter notebook.
Jupyter Notebook is a powerful python code editor which can be installed on your local machine and works in the browser. I have been coding with jupyter notebook for about two years now and using a keyboard shortcut from the first week itself (i like to do things without touching the mouse, it seems more professional 😄)
You can always read more about jupyter notebook on Wikipedia
Note: This article may help windows & Linux users directly, for MAC users, there will be some changes in keys — ctrl → command, Alt → Option
When a jupyter notebook starts, we could see whole keyboard shortcuts by pressing esc & h
The first thing most of us may do on jupyter notebook is to change the title but as of now, there is no default keyboard shortcut for title renaming, but I have set a custom keyboard shortcut for renaming the title— which will be explained at the next section of this article
Now, let’s jump on to excellent jupyter notebook keyboard shortcuts
- Escape key to exit the current cell
When the notebook starts, the first cell will be active(cell edit mode) so to change the mode to command mode — simply press esc key
we could see this change by the change in color of this cell outline
These active and command modes are important, most commands given in this article work on command mode
2. Letter ‘A’ to add multiple cells above (command mode)
We need more cells to work on, we could add more cells by clicking the letter A multiple times. We could add cells below by clicking B, but we use A initially to make the cell selection line(cell outline) stay at the top cell. We could move up & down through cells using the UP & DOWN arrow keys, and ENTER key to enter the selected cell.
3. Autofill code using tab key (active mode)
After entering a cell and while writing the code, it is very helpful if the code editor has a code completion like PyCharm & VS Code. Jupyter notebook also has this functionality in tab key. You just need to press the tab key wherever you need to complete the code, this could be a variable name, a function name, etc…
4. Run the current cell and select the next cell using Shift+Enter (active mode)
After entering a cell and writing some code, we need to run it right? — then press shift+enter to run the cell & go to the next cell.
5. To see function documentation & examples — shift+tab (active mode)
If we don’t know what are the arguments & return of a function, we could find them by pressing shift+tab
Note: you need to run the import statement to get the documentation of a function
6. Showing Line numbers — shift+L (command mode)
By default, the line numbering is off in jupyter notebook but it is very helpful to see the line numbers, especially when our code has some errors. You can turn on the line numbers by clicking shift+Lin command mode.
7. Find and replace using the ‘F’ key (command mode)
Changing a variable name that is written in different places is a tedious task, we could do it simply using find and replace just like many other applications. In jupyter notebook, you just need to press the letter F in command mode(blue outline around the cell)
Enter the word to find in the Find box and word to replace in the Replace box
This ↓ is an example usage of find and replace. The words enclosed in the red box will be replaced with words in the green box
8. M for Markdown and Y for code (command mode)
If you finished writing the code and you are ready to explain or send it to your friend or professor, then it would be a good practice to add some Markdown or LaTeX commands in your notebook to explain the idea more clearly.
Markdown is a simple markup language to write formatted text. It will take only 1 or 2 hours to study the markdown, take a look here
LaTeX is a software used for document preparation, especially research papers — extra info 😉
For this, just make a new cell above(A) or below(B) and just press the letter M to convert the cell to a markdown cell. The Markdown cells do not have the In[ ] at the cell’s starting.
To convert your cell to a normal coding cell, just press the letter Y.
9. Delete cells using dd (command mode)
It is better to delete the unused cells for the final draft of your notebook, just press the letter d twice to delete the current cell.
Be careful while using this shortcut, because we cannot undo the action using Ctrl+Z
· User-Defined Keyboard Shortcuts — I have defined 2 shortcuts in my notebook, to make my workflow faster.
How to define your own Keyboard Shortcuts in jupyter notebook?
Help → Edit Keyboard Shortcuts
Here, I am adding Alt+Ctrl+Ra key bind for run all cells. Hit enter to commit the new shortcut and click OK button on the right bottom.
Make sure, your new shortcut does not exist in the notebook & if your new shortcut contains multiple keys, separate them using hyphen -
- Renaming the notebook (command mode)
I have added a shortcut for renaming the notebook by pressing the letter N.
2. Move cells up and down (command mode)
When we have some relevant codes in a cell, it is more faster to move the cells up or down than cut and paste.
I have added a shortcut to move cells using Alt+Up arrow for moving cells up and Alt+Down arrowfor moving cells down.
Reached till here?
Some extra jupyter notebook tips and tricks for you
- Re-run your notebook for perfect results
When you finish writing the code and you got the result, don't stop the process but do, Kernel → Restart & Clear Output to restart the kernel and clear all the outputs from your notebook. Then re-run all the cells by Cell → Run All .
By doing this, the notebook will clear all the saved variables from its environment and redo all the processes again, it may be sometimes computationally intensive but give you the perfect results.
2. Presenting the notebook
Presenting the notebook separately in a tab of your browser will make you stand out. To do this, activate the presentation mode view → cell toolbar → slideshow
It will open up a drop-down at the right side of each cell
Slide- the cell will be a new slideSub-Slide- the cell will be shown in the current slide as a replacement for previous content. It will be available in arrow-down navigationFragment- the cell will appear in the current slide, and it will append to the previous content. It will be available in arrow-down and arrow-right navigationSkip- the content will not be displayed in the presentationNotes- notes for slide, the cell content is not displayed in the presentation
These explanations are taken from here
After setting the required modes, we can export the .ipynb file to the presentation file using
jupyter nbconvert <notebook-name>.ipynb --to slides --post serve--to slidesto convert the .ipynb file to a presentation file .html--post serveto host the presentation file on the local HTTP server
Now you could see something like this ↓
That's all, thank you for reading the article, hope it helps to make your workflow faster.
