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Show HN: A modern Jupyter client for macOS

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Re: Show HN: A modern Jupyter client for macOS

#21

Post by asdf_snar »

I use Jupyter Lab every day on OSX in scientific/academic work, so I feel I am your target audience. In case it helps you gauge my impression, I spent about two minutes reading the post and scrolling through the website.

I feel I did not understand the main advantages of this notebook aside from the AI integration. I don't understand how "start-up" time is a cost; I have a Jupyter server running at all times and use it as a scratch-pad throughout the day, so it is always available.

I don't understand the "modern command palette". As far as I can tell all the commands are available to regular Jupyter Labs, and either way I always use hotkeys for them.

The code formatting using black isn't bad, but notebooks are for scratchy ideas, not real code. If I'm at the point of formatting code, it's going in an actual IDE. I'd even argue providing formatting inside of a notebook encourages bad habits for scientists, who prefer to stay entirely within a notebook, but are then sometimes unable to reproduce their results.

I don't see the advantage of the copy-paste; I can copy paste directly from Labs to Slack/online editing pages, and certain Latex typesetters.

Pros: it looks pretty, the site has nice demo videos (in terms of quality; I didn't understand the content).

I want to like this but I don't see any benefits for a power user except for the AI integration; if AI is the only selling point then I prefer to get it differently.

Re: Show HN: A modern Jupyter client for macOS

#22

Post by cheptsov »

jackhodkinson wrote: post #12
cheptsov wrote: post #6

Can I use it to connect to a remote Jupyter notebook server?

Not yet! But I'm working on this :)

That will be interesting. Happy to test and share feedback. Previously, I was a part of the DataSpell and PyCharm team building notebook support. Now working with dstack, where we support dev environments and super interested in remote support.

Re: Show HN: A modern Jupyter client for macOS

#23

Post by jackhodkinson »

asdf_snar wrote: post #21

I use Jupyter Lab every day on OSX in scientific/academic work, so I feel I am your target audience. In case it helps you gauge my impression, I spent about two minutes reading the post and scrolling through the website. I feel I did not understand the main advantages of this notebook aside from the AI integration. I don't understand how "start-up" time is a cost; I have a Jupyter server running at all times and use…

Thanks for your feedback!

If you'd be happy to share: I'm curious to know what scientific field you work in? Do you do 100% computational work, or is it a mixture of experimental and computational?

Re: Show HN: A modern Jupyter client for macOS

#24

Post by jackhodkinson »

cheptsov wrote: post #22
jackhodkinson wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not yet! But I'm working on this :)

That will be interesting. Happy to test and share feedback. Previously, I was a part of the DataSpell and PyCharm team building notebook support. Now working with dstack, where we support dev environments and super interested in remote support.

Thanks! I'll let you know when it's ready. What do you use now to work with remote environments? JupyterLab or VS Code?

Re: Show HN: A modern Jupyter client for macOS

#26

Post by ayhanfuat »

asdf_snar wrote: post #21

I use Jupyter Lab every day on OSX in scientific/academic work, so I feel I am your target audience. In case it helps you gauge my impression, I spent about two minutes reading the post and scrolling through the website. I feel I did not understand the main advantages of this notebook aside from the AI integration. I don't understand how "start-up" time is a cost; I have a Jupyter server running at all times and use…

I also use notebooks and qtconsole daily so I'd like to chime in.

- I don't have a continuously running notebook server. I start it when I need to and shut it down if I won't be working with it for a while. I do like the idea of clicking an icon and starting an app.

- Modern command palette, I believe, is similar to what you would see in apps like VS code. It doesn't offer more commands but instead make it easier to find and execute commands. I don't use Jupyter Lab so I don't know if it has a command palette but Jupyter Notebook doesn't so that seems like an advantage to me.

- I disagree on the formatting point, too. Even if I am just doing something very quick I cannot stand seeing lines extending some length, no space after a colon, single vs double quote inconsistency etc. So I do spend time formatting them even if I am on IDLE and know for sure I am not going to save it. Thankfully, IPython added support for Black so it is less of an issue for me.

Apps in this area generally focused on extending Jupyter to maybe combine SQL/JS with Python, making data exploration easier but I do appreciate a light app that just gives me a notebook experience with some small advantages, especially considering Classic Notebook is going to go away soon. I'll definitely give it a try.

Re: Show HN: A modern Jupyter client for macOS

#27

Post by oli5679 »

I use notebooks the whole time, normally in vs-code and with github copilot setup.

I found it quite painful to point it to a couple of environments I have, and confusing how i get it pointing to my gpt4 api keys. Once I did these two I was not sure how to prompt rather than typing a command.

Good luck with this, don't mean this in a critical way, just trying to give some feedback of what I think when I first try it.

Re: Show HN: A modern Jupyter client for macOS

#28

Post by [deleted] »

asdf_snar wrote: post #21

I use Jupyter Lab every day on OSX in scientific/academic work, so I feel I am your target audience. In case it helps you gauge my impression, I spent about two minutes reading the post and scrolling through the website. I feel I did not understand the main advantages of this notebook aside from the AI integration. I don't understand how "start-up" time is a cost; I have a Jupyter server running at all times and use…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: A modern Jupyter client for macOS

#29

Post by hatmatrix »

asdf_snar wrote: post #21

I use Jupyter Lab every day on OSX in scientific/academic work, so I feel I am your target audience. In case it helps you gauge my impression, I spent about two minutes reading the post and scrolling through the website. I feel I did not understand the main advantages of this notebook aside from the AI integration. I don't understand how "start-up" time is a cost; I have a Jupyter server running at all times and use…

I switched to Windows/WSL2 a few years back so don't have a fight in this game (though if it's Electron, why only macOS?) - but having to switch between IDE and Jupyter for code formatting seems like unnecessary overhead.

But TBH Quarto is much better in this regard; you can use a VScode together with another IDE if you wish to format/edit/run chunks of code in the same file.

Re: Show HN: A modern Jupyter client for macOS

#30

Post by rahimnathwani »

oli5679 wrote: post #27

I use notebooks the whole time, normally in vs-code and with github copilot setup. I found it quite painful to point it to a couple of environments I have, and confusing how i get it pointing to my gpt4 api keys. Once I did these two I was not sure how to prompt rather than typing a command. Good luck with this, don't mean this in a critical way, just trying to give some feedback of what I think when I first try it.

I also edit my notebooks in vscode. I wouldn't switch to something that doesn't support GitHub copilot, unless completions are much better.
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