Make JupyterLab move to, or open in, different folders

Trying, once again, to learn JupyterLab, having given up on it a while ago because of this problem, to which I never found an answer:
I can find no way to move, in JupyterLab, to different folders (in Windows). JupyterLab opens to my “Users” folder, which I Never “Use”. That folder contains lots of stuff having nothing to do with python, most of which I don’t even recognize. I cannot get JupyterLab to move to other folders which I’ve created (in C:) that are dedicated solely to python files. It seems that, to use those files in JupyterLab, I have to move them (individually, not as folders!) into this (never used!) “Users” folder, thereby mixing them with unrelated junk. Or, having created python files, via JupyterLab, solely within “Users”, must I then move them, manually, into the folders where I want them? In R it’s easy to move around folders in C. Why not in JupyterLab? Or – this would be an acceptable solution – having JupyterLab open directly in C:. Probably it (either of these solutions) can be done, but I can’t find out how. Hence this query. If it can be done, my query then becomes: Why is it so damn hard to find?

Hi Ben, how do you run/start JupyterLab? If you start it using the console/terminal, you can cd to the directory you want JupyterLab to see as its root directory and then start JupyterLab by typing “jupyter lab”. Let us know if that works!

Thanks very much! Yes, that works – at least I can force it to open with the entire C drive as the root directory, and then move to anything within C, and back to C and then to another folder within C, etc. Good enough (barely!) for me to start learning to use JupyterLab. But annoyingly clunky, working thru the terminal (which I’ve put on my desktop, rather than Anaconda itself, which takes forever to load and contains the unwanted kitchen sink). The terminal itself is annoying, as it opens in a subfolder of the Users folder, so I gotta back up two steps to get to the entire C:, where I want JL to open. Was hoping JL would remember where it was when shut down and open there the next time. But no such luck. Don’t understand why it wasn’t designed to be easier to use.

I believe that you can configure the directory that Jupyter will run in, and that Anaconda will respect that. See here for details: How to change Jupyter notebook start up folder in Anaconda