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VS Code Python Tool Boosts Jupyter Notebooks Functionality

The latest update of the Python extension for Visual Studio Code -- by far the most popular tool in the editor's marketplace -- boosts its Jupyter Notebooks functionality by adding support for ipywidgets, sometimes called Jupyter widgets.

That support was one of the top-requested features for the extension, opened up as a GitHub issue back on Nov. 21, 2018.

The ipywidgets GitHub site describes them as interactive HTML widgets for Jupyter notebooks, JupyterLab and the IPython kernel.

ipywidgets in Animated Action
[Click on image for larger, animated GIF view.] ipywidgets in Animated Action (source: Microsoft).

"Today we're excited to announce that we now support all ipywidgets (including custom ones) in Jupyter Notebooks in VS Code," said Jeffrey Mew of the VS Code dev team in an April 21 blog post. "This means that you can bring all your favorite interactive plotting libraries such as beakerX, bqplot, and many more, to visualize and interact with data in Notebooks and VS Code!"

Otherwise, the new update was described as a short release, addressing 42 other issues. One of those was debugger support for Django and Flask auto-reload in the debugpy Python debugger introduced in the March update.

The full list of enhancements for the extension -- No. 1 in the marketplace with some 19 million downloads -- is available in the changelog.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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