How To Create Shortcut For Jupyter Notebook

Jupyter Notebook Shortcuts

What is Jupyter Notebook?

Jupyter Notebook is widely used for data analysis. I started to learn Data Science 2–3 months ago and I used this tool to explore some datasets (a collection of data). It's awesome!

Let's see the definition from the docs.

The notebooks documents are documents produced by the Jupyter Notebook App, which can contain both code (e.g. Python) and rich text elements (paragraphs, equations, links, etc..).

The Jupyter Notebook App is a client-server application that allows editing and running notebook documents by a browser.

Here you can find more detailed information if you want to.

Shortcuts

As a developer, I like to use shortcuts and snippets as much as I can. They just make writing code a lot easier and faster. I like to follow one rule:

If you start doing some action with the mouse, stop and think if there is a shortcut. If there is a one - use it.

When I started usin g Jupyter Notebook I didn't know that there are shortcuts for this tool. Several times, I changed my cell type from code to markdown and I didn't know how. As you can guess this caused me a lot of headache. One day I just saw that there is a Help > Keyboard Shortcuts link in the menu bar. To my surprise, it turned out that Jupyter Notebook has a ton of shortcuts.

In this article, I'll show you my favorite ones. Note that the shortcuts are for Windows and Linux users. Anyway, for the Mac users, they're different buttons for Ctrl, Shift, and Alt:

Ctrl: command key ⌘
Shift: Shift ⇧
Alt: option ⌥

First, we need to know that they are 2 modes in the Jupyter Notebook App: command mode and edit mode. I'll start with the shortcuts shared between the two modes.

Shortcuts in both modes:

Shift + Enter run the current cell, select below
Ctrl + Enter run selected cells
Alt + Enter run the current cell, insert below
Ctrl + S save and checkpoint

While in command mode (press Esc to activate):

Enter take you into edit mode
H show all shortcuts
Up select cell above
Down select cell below
Shift + Up extend selected cells above
Shift + Down extend selected cells below
A insert cell above
B insert cell below
X cut selected cells
C copy selected cells
V paste cells below
Shift + V paste cells above
D, D (press the key twice) delete selected cells
Z undo cell deletion
S Save and Checkpoint
Y change the cell type to Code
M change the cell type to Markdown
P open the command palette.
This dialog helps you run any command by name. It's really useful if you don't know some shortcut or when you don't have a shortcut for the wanted command.

Shift + Space scroll notebook up
Space scroll notebook down

While in edit mode (pressEnter to activate)

Esc take you into command mode
Tab code completion or indent
Shift + Tab tooltip
Ctrl + ] indent
Ctrl + [ dedent
Ctrl + A select all
Ctrl + Z undo
Ctrl + Shift + Z or Ctrl + Y redo
Ctrl + Home go to cell start
Ctrl + End go to cell end
Ctrl + Left go one word left
Ctrl + Right go one word right
Ctrl + Shift + P open the command palette
Down move cursor down
Up move cursor up

These are the shortcuts I use in my daily work. If you still need something that is not mentioned here you can find it in the keyboard shortcuts dialog (H). You can also edit existing or add more shortcuts from the Help > Edit Keyboard Shortcuts link in the menu bar. Clicking the link will open a dialog. At the bottom of it there are rules for adding or editing shortcuts. You need to use hyphens - to represent keys that should be pressed at the same time.

For example, I added a shortcut Ctrl-R for the restart kernel and run all cells command.

Final Words

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