Can the Jupyter Notebook keyboard shortcuts work with Jupyter Lab?

General
1

The one thing that has stopped me from moving to JupyterLab is my dependence on certain shortcut keys. Namely a,b for inserting cells above and below. Keys like c,v for copy pasting content. I have heard that a similar functionality is available for JupyterLab but I have always had to resort to mouse clicks to achieve the same thing. Is there a way to do this now in JupyterLab?

2

yes, all of the ones listed work when in ā€œcommandā€ mode (vs ā€œedit modeā€ with the blinking text caret). The examples on Project Jupyter | Try Jupyter (whether powered by binder or jupyterlite) should give enough data to evaluate its fitness.

Also, the forthcoming Notebook 7, evolved from RetroLab should be coming along shortly, and might further ease the transition, as a good deal of attention is being paid to emulating the classic document-based experienceā€¦ for a time, both the jquery/bootstrap notebook will continue to be supported, but the volunteer-based support window is fairly concretely closing.

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3

Will it still support debugging? That is the one feature that I would like from JupyterLab.

4

All things are possible, and there is some work underway, though many people cite the lack of extra clutter of the document-centric interface as a feature. Might not be able to have it both ways.

5

Iā€™ve used Jupyter in the past, and then tried to use Jupyterlabā€¦ and found that simple stuff does not work, ā€˜hā€™ to get a list of shortcutsā€¦ Whaaaaat?

So, after more digging, it turns out that a LOT of shortcuts on Jupyter notebook just donā€™t work.
Ack. The ā€œUIā€ for JupyterLab is nice and all, but why jack up all of the shortcuts?? Is there some technical reason to just make them all different/not working? The ā€˜basicā€™ ones workā€¦ but, learning a set of shortcuts takes time, and to change that, well, itā€™s not a friendly thing to do.

6

Perhaps there is a way to turn them onā€¦ in which case, Iā€™m hasty in my judgementā€¦ Is there a way to enable ā€œnotebok modeā€ for shortcuts so they are the same, or reasonably close to the same?

7

This is included in JupyterLab 4.0 under Ctrl + Shift + H (https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/pull/14053).

As for why it is not H see this @fcollonvalā€™s comment on PR discussion:

I fear using H is to simple to be robust in JupyterLab. And as the shortcuts help can be displayed on any document, it will for example be impossible to use it with the file editor. So we would end up having multiple shortcuts depending on the active document.

But at least the infrastructure does not prevent us to use H in Notebook v7.

Similarly, for many shortcuts there will be a solid rationale for any departures from Notebook ones, but there may be some shortcuts which were just omitted and can be implemented if someone can contribute :slight_smile:

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