FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

General Questions

What is the Jupyter extension?

The Jupyter extension is a VS Code extension designed to add a Jupyter notebook coding experience to VS Code for Python and other languages that participate in the Jupyter ecosystem. See https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-toolsai.jupyter for more information.

Why does the Python extension depend on it?

The Jupyter notebook functionality has been built into the Python extension since 2019. In October of 2020, we separated out the notebook functionality as well as some other functionality that may be generally useful to users beyond Python so that other languages could easily create VS Code notebook experiences without needing a Python install or Python extension dependency. Therefore, while the Jupyter extension does not need the Python extension, the Python extension does require the Jupyter extension for some of its functionality. Other language extensions like R and Julia may in the future end up depending on the Jupyter extension as well.

There are a large number of users of the Python extension that open Jupyter notebooks. In addition, our interactive experience was built with notebook users in mind, but can also be highly valuable to non-notebook users. Finally, we are planning on including other capabilities in the future for variable and data viewing that will be useful to all Python users (not just notebook users), so this dependency is likely to remain. We believe these benefits outweigh the small inconvenience to those who don't use any of the features (which may be actually be also true of other features in the Python extension itself).

Workarounds for Common or Recent Issues

Why am I not able to run Python cells in a notebook or the interactive window? Or Why isn't my Python kernel starting?

Please see: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-jupyter/wiki/Troubleshooting-Jupyter-issues-in-the-Python-Interactive-Window-or-Notebook-Editor