Items missing from the left sidebar

General
1

The The JupyterLab Interface section in the JupyterLab Docs states that

“The left sidebar contains … the command palette, the notebook cell tools inspector, and the tabs list”

These three items do not show up in my installation. The other elements (omitted in the quote above) do show up.

Otherwise JupyterLab seems to be working fine.

Why are these three items missing?

2

Good catch! This part of documentation needs updating:

  • the command palette became modal by default with JupyterLab 3.0 release (you can bring it up with Ctrl + Shift + c or Mac equivalent) but it can be shown in the sidebar if you go to Advanced Settings Editor and add "model": false to Command Palette settings).
  • the tab list and running kernels list were merged together a single Running Terminals and Kernels list; (which I guess should be renamed to include tabs?)
  • the property inspector was moved to the right sidebar in JupyterLab 3.0

And those are using icons rather than text so the screenshot is even more outdated. It would be a good first pull request if you are interested in fixing it in the documentation :slight_smile:

3

Thanks for your tip! I could not find this information elsewhere.

Minor correction: … add “modal”: false instead of “model”.

4

That’s right, sorry about the typo! I updated the documentation in Update screenshots and text for user interface docs by krassowski · Pull Request #11499 · jupyterlab/jupyterlab · GitHub which will hopefully get merged next week. Please feel welcome to suggest any other improvements to the documentation or fixes if you encounter any issues.

PS. For minor fixes there is an “Edit on GitHub” button which enables making quick contributions from the browser :slight_smile:

5

Is there a known way to set the modal option to false in a config file so that the Command Palette is displayed in the sidebar for all users on a JupyterHub instance? For example, I set the setting to false through the JupyterLab GUI for one user, but that doesn’t affect the display for all other users.

6

This might seem dumb but my problem was i did not install labs but had the server. Check to see if your installed by. Checking in conda environment run

jupyter --version

IPython : 7.34.0
ipykernel : 6.16.2
ipywidgets : 8.0.6
jupyter_client : 7.4.9
jupyter_core : 4.12.0
jupyter_server : 1.24.0
jupyterlab : not installed
nbclient : 0.7.4

then install by running

python -m pip install jupyterlab

next start lab

jupyter lab

7

Yes, there is! Create an overrides.json file in the settings directory of application path and populate it as described in Advanced Usage — JupyterLab 4.0.0 documentation

8

Ah, I see. Changing the GUI Settings/Settings Editor/Command Palette to false makes this file on my Mac:

davex ~ % cat $HOME/.jupyter/lab/user-settings/@jupyterlab/apputils-extension/palette.jupyterlab-settings
{
    "modal": false
}%                                                                                                                                                                                               davex ~ %