Super cool 10 hidden features in Google Colab

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5 min readAug 29, 2019

There is no Doubt that GColab is one of the most online used cloud based Jupyter notebooks and also you may have read many more articles about working on colab but believe me this is totally different !

There are a lot many features which are not yet simply observed or are hidden but shortly they will be yours and most of them will increase your productivity 💡

If you are new to colab , head to colab here . I am sure you will stick around with it.

After reading this article , you will never go to any other editor/IDE/env

Let’s start —

👉 First and foremost , for a developer one should be able to work in dark mode theme (of course they are like awesome ! 😎)

👉 Sometimes, you accidentally delete a cell (cut the cell) , now what to do ? Is there any way you can get it back(whole code and output) ?

Magic of “ctrl + shift +z” :

What ? why to press 3 buttons simultaneously for such a simple task ?
This takes us to our third trick.
If you don’t like it enough , change it !

👉 There are number of handy shortcuts which you are going to see in this next graphics :

remember : when setting your custom shortcuts , directly press the keys you wanna select (don’t write the keys , as that is invalid action here)

Be sure to checkout other shortcuts and set your customized shortcuts !

👉 There is one more shortcut which will come in handy , so sometimes we need to replace each and every occurrence of one single string with some another string.

Magic of “ctrl + H” (find and replace) but the most exciting thing is that you can play around with regular expressions:

👉 Okay, so this trick can be super useful when you wanna write some code in your notebook and then you also wanna run some code in a separate env (maybe compare something) but you don’t wanna necessarily include that in your notebook.

👉 It’s time to open new features introduced in google colab to increase your productivity to a new level !

It’s auto completion feature, syntax highlighting and many other features like directly go to module/library documentation by simply hovering over it !

👉 Do you felt that Tesla K80 GPU was never enough for you !

Now, you will be amazed to use more power and more faster computations using newly introduced NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPUs.

(All this using just a single line)

👉 What could be more awesome than by the fact that while you are working on colab, if you can keep pushing your repo/files and commits to github and that too with multiple branches.
Not only this, you can open any github repo directly in colab by using the it’s link.

Pro tip : if you wanna share something from colab to github, you can also check the box which creates a direct link to colab and pastes it on top of your repo