Installing Jupyter notebook extensions

Jupyter notebook extensions are patches that add interesting features, such as marking the 80 character column in code, offering navigation through sections, activating slide mode and offering a better presentation for this. This seems to be still in a state of flux and every time I need to reinstall them, I find it hard to find the recipes on Windows.

So here they go. First we install the notebook and the extensions.

conda install notebook
conda install -c conda-forge jupyter_contrib_nbextensions

Note the different channels. Somehow jupyter_contrib is only available in conda-forge, but does not seem to interfere with the standard installation of Jupyter by Anaconda.

We then activate the extensions for the current user. This requires copying some files to a location that Jupyter looks for when launching. I do this at the user level, so that this installation only affects my current user.

jupyter contrib nbextension install --user
jupyter nbextensions_configurator enable --user

I also like to make presentations out of notebooks. For that I use RISE which can also be installed similarly

conda install rise

Finally, Anaconda lists a version of notebooks that is very high (6.4 as of this writing). Some extensions are formally not enabled unless you go to "Nbextensions" and deselect the option "disable configuration for nbextensions without explicit compatibility".