Jupyter Notebooks allows you to start more than just Notebooks. In this lesson you’ll learn how to start new terminals and create folders or files within the browser.

00:01 This next one will be a short one. We’re going to talk about other things that you can make with the Notebook server. Let’s jump right in. This is the main page of our Notebook server.

00:11 This is where we created our first Notebook, by pressing here New and then Python 3 Notebook. And we can see it sitting up here. It’s running, last edited, et cetera, file size.

00:23 But that’s not the only thing we can do here. We can also create other things in the New tab. We can create folders, make a nested structure, we can give those a name. I’m not going to deal with that now, so I’ll just delete it again.

00:41 What is useful, though, in here is we can create also a terminal window. When I press the Terminal here, it opens up my shell that I have installed in my system, up here as well as in the browser. So, in here I can perform any terminal command that I want.

00:57 I can check up on which Python am I using, for example, and we can see that it’s the one that’s sitting inside of my virtual environment. So it just opens up a shell inside of the browser and I can do—any commands that I would do with my shell, I can do right in here.

01:12 So, that’s something that can come in handy once in a while.

01:17 We also have the Running tab up here in the Notebook server. In here, I can see which things I have currently running on the server, so we see that Notebook is happening here, and also the terminal that I just opened up. And from here, I can control them. I can Shutdown…

01:35 and it’s good to keep an overview of what is actually going on at the moment. Sometimes if you work with a lot of Notebooks, it could get messy, so it’s nice to take a look here and maybe shut down some of them to ease up on your memory. And the Clusters tab is something that I personally never use, and it seems there’s a reason for that, right? So don’t worry about that one.

01:58 And that’s pretty much it about the Notebook server. Essentially, just know that this is where you can create new Notebooks and also terminals that might sometimes come in handy.

richardacairns on July 31, 2020

Hi Martin, which terminal are you using? It doesn’t look like the standard Mac Terminal app.

Martin Breuss RP Team on Aug. 1, 2020

Hi @richardacairns. I’m using the z-shell, also called zsh, and specificially a distribution called Oh My Zsh. Hope I spelled this correctly, I never know how to pronounce it either 😅

richardacairns on Aug. 1, 2020

Thanks @Martin 😀

TomDevUK on Jan. 29, 2021

Worth mentioning that terminals only work in Unix based systems so in Windows you will get “Terminals Unavailable” message

Martin Breuss RP Team on Jan. 29, 2021

Hi @TomDevUK! I’ve only tested it on MacOS, but I’m relatively sure that it works on Windows as well. I know that @Mike Driscoll, who wrote the associated tutorial, works on a Windows machine. He mentions PowerShell when discussing the Terminals.

I couldn’t find anything explicitly mentioning them in the Jupyter Notebook documentation, however, the Jupyter Labs documentation does explain how to use Terminals with Jupyter on Windows.

Maybe try restarting or resetting your installation, make sure you have access to PowerShell, and let us know whether that solved it.

If it doesn’t, you could switch to using Jupyter Labs instead, which offers a lot of cool upgrades and a better IDE experience than Jupyter Notebooks.

DShealth on March 13, 2022

Thanks, my autocomplete is not activated in my notebook, please help.

Troy on Aug. 5, 2023

I know its difficult to keep up with these fast paced tools, but this tutorial is WAY behind. It needs updated especially around extensions.

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Jupyter Terminals and More