Live-share: Support for Jupyter Notebooks

[ckcampbell248]

VS Code has great built-in support for Jupyter Notebooks (.ipynb files). It would be great to have collaboration support for them through LiveShare.

[setaskin]

Hi, thanks you for reaching out and sharing. Adding @fubaduba to follow up .

[fvde]

Is support for this being considered? We'd love to use it...

[jdmedinatobon]

I would also love to use it..

[amunozj]

I would also like to add my voice to this request. It would be great to have this functionality

[Btibert3]

I am evaluating using Live Share (read-only) for my upcoming python/data science course this fall at Boston University, and while the behavior is great for python scripts, the lack of Live Share ipynb support is a blocker for my teaching. In case it helps, while testing last night, this is what a connected user saw when attempting to open the notebook file I was sharing.

[dvanic]

I think that with the COVID-induced pivot to online teaching this would a MASSIVE boost to the adoption of VSCode for teaching, especially in Universities and researcher-focused bootcamps. I think supporting .ipynb and .R/.Rmarkdown would make it such a useful tool! It would also attract a completely new cohort and quite substantial cohort of users to VSCode.

[fanzhuyifan]

@setaskin @fubaduba Hello?? Any updates on this issue??

I would also love to see live share working with Jupyter notebooks!

[setaskin]

Hi @fanzhuyifan , the work is recently scheduled and in progress. Adding @daytonellwanger to follow up.

[okayvinay]

Is this available now?

[daytonellwanger]

The notebooks experience in VS Code powered by the Python extension has had Live Share support for over a year now. Are folks seeing that broken? Or are you referencing a different notebooks experience?

[fanzhuyifan]

@daytonellwanger Live share works for .py files and we have “notebook” experience by manually delimiting cells with %%.
However, for me, it does not work for .ipynb jupyter notebooks at all. Is it supposed to work?

[daytonellwanger]

@fanzhuyifan are the .ipynb opened correctly as notebooks outside of Live Share using the Python extension?

[fanzhuyifan]

@daytonellwanger
Here is what I did to test:

• My partner and I disabled all extensions except for python and liveshare.
• Then each one of us tried to host a live share session.
• After the session started, one of us would open a .ipynb file in the workspace.
• For a moment the raw json formatted file would open and we could see each other's cursors.
• Then the notebooks would be correctly shown in notebook format and there we can no longer see each other's cursors.
• Our edits would only appear on our own screen, not on the other person's screen.
• During that I also got this warning consistently:
  

In addition, I was not able to find on the web any demo of liveshare working with jupyter notebooks in .ipynb files. The official website only mentions support for "Jupyter-like code cells" via #%%link. If only some of us are having this issue, it would be nice if you could provide a demo.

[fanzhuyifan]

@daytonellwanger Hi! Is there any more information that I need to provide?

[daytonellwanger]

@rchiodo , could you provide some guidance maybe?

[rchiodo]

Sorry but ipynb files are not currently supported. When we switch to the native notebook implementation, this should light up soon.

This blog post shows how to switch to using the new notebooks. Live share will be here soon.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/notebooks-are-getting-revamped/

[adrianmaurer]

Any expected release date for this feature?

[daytonellwanger]

@adrianmaurer , we haven't committed to a specific release date, but tentatively sometime around February or March.