Jupyter Notebook “hacks” for cleaner, simpler Notebooks

1.) Make your plot settings “sticky”

Typing the same command more than two times is annoying. Run this at the top of your notebook to set a default size for your matplotlib plots:

matplotlib.rcParams[‘figure.figsize’] = (13,8)

You can also use this for other matplotlib settings like so:

matplotlib.rcParams['lines.linewidth'] = 2
matplotlib.rcParams['lines.color'] = 'r'

Or group them together:

matplotlib.rc('lines', linewidth=2, color='r')

(From matplotlib — Customizing matplotlib)

What does “rc” stand for? Apparently the suffix stands for “run command” and is a “fossil” in UNIX systems from CTSS, invented in the 1960's.

2.) Make your Jupyter Notebook wider

from IPython.core.display import display, HTML
display(HTML(“<style>.container { width:80% !important; }</style>”))

Why waste all that wonderful space?

3.) Make your plots higher resolution

%config InlineBackend.figure_format = ‘retina’

4.) Link to other notebooks

# In Markdown cell:
[Link text here](‘/path/notebook.ipynb’)

This goes a long way in organizing notebooks, so you don’t have to scroll through a bunch of DataFrame printouts to get to your fancy graphs at the end.

6.) Present your Notebook as slides

!jupyter nbconvert this_notebook.ipynb --to slides --post serve

Go to View > Cell Toolbar > Slideshow to group your cells into slides. This will allow you to arrow through slides once it is in the presentation.

My default settings:

I just run this at the top of every notebook.

import matplotlib
matplotlib.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (13,8)
%config InlineBackend.figure_format = 'retina'

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