Could you please bring back the Classic View in JupyterHub?

JupyterHub
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Hello Jupyter Community,

I am a college instructor who has been extensively using JupyterHub for presenting lectures. I’ve always preferred the classic notebook interface, similar to that in the local Anaconda Jupyter Notebook, because it suits my teaching style and my students’ needs for several reasons:

  1. Many of my students are already familiar with the classic interface because they have Anaconda Jupyter Notebook installed on their own computers.
  2. Some features that were straightforward in the classic view seem less intuitive in the current interface.
  3. The classic view’s simplicity and clarity are particularly beneficial in an educational setting.

Recently, I could not find the classic view option from JupyterHub. Therefore, I would like to ask the JupyterHub team to consider bringing back the classic view as an optional interface. Thank you very much.

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We have some docs on this, but there are really two ways to select the ‘classic’ notebook, depending on how classic you want to be.

The first is to actually use the old notebook server, for which you need two things:

  • An old version of the notebook package in the user environment: pip install 'notebook<7'
  • Instruct JupyterHub to use it: c.Spawner.environment = {"JUPYTERHUB_SINGLEUSER_APP": "notebook"}

Or, for a more sustainable option, use the classic style UI, built on modern tools, with the latest version of the notebook package:

  • install latest notebook: pip install 'notebook>=7'
  • use classic tree view as the default URL: c.Spawner.default_url = '/tree/'

which has benefits in terms of accessibility and sustainability, but please do provide feedback on anything you feel is still missing there.

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Assuming that this is about Notebook 6 → Notebook 7 transition, are there any specific parts of the interface that changed in a way that is detrimental to your classroom experience? If so, would you consider describing these problematic changes so that we can highlight them to any other volunteers willing to contribute? I would not want anyone stuck on the legacy interface and rather than suffering in silence let us help you.

  1. Many of my students are already familiar with the classic interface because they have Anaconda Jupyter Notebook installed on their own computers.

Two months ago Anaconda switched to Notebook 7 too (Notebook :: Anaconda.org) so if they install it again, they will have the new interface.

The classic view’s simplicity and clarity are particularly beneficial in an educational setting.

My impression was that Notebook 7 follows Notebook 6 view simplicity quite closely (that was the aim stated in the design goals and on Announcing Jupyter Notebook 7. Jupyter Notebook 7 is the most… | by Project Jupyter | Jupyter Blog). Could it be that you are referring to JupyterLab instead?

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