Visual Studio Code (VSCode) Running GoNB

April 7, 2024 ยท View on GitHub

VSCode can open GoNB notebooks as a normal tab. When opening it will ask the kernel to use, and if you have GoNB installed it will offer it as an option.

There are some caveats though:

Code Completions

VSCode doesn't talk Jupyter's Completion protocol and hence won't make use of the auto-complete or contextual information that GoNB offers (using gopls).

For Python VSCode relies on IntelliSense.

Javascript Caveats

VSCode does not "render" mimetype text/javascript properly, instead it just displays it as text. Hence gonbui.ScriptJavascript won't work.

That affects widgets (it won't work), and Plotly (only up to version 0.9.6, after that it started using gonbui.DisplayHtml and should start working).

Example, the following doesn't work:

import "github.com/janpfeifer/gonb/gonbui"

%%
gonbui.ScriptJavascript(`<script>alert('hello');</script>`)

But the following does:

import "github.com/janpfeifer/gonb/gonbui"

%%
gonbui.DisplayHtml(`<script>alert('hello');</script>`)

No WASM

It's an experimental feature for GoNB, but in VSCode for various reasons won't work either.

Polyglot

"Polyglot Notebooks for VS Code. Use multiple languages in one notebook with full language server support for each language and share variables between them."

Unfortunately, they don't list Go as a supported language.

Installing it does require installing .NET SDK.

Debugging

I'm not an expert, so I'm not sure where VSCode sends the logs (stderr) of GoNB kernel execution. But GoNB has an option to also output its logs to a specific file: --extra_log=<output>. You can install it with this flag, restart VSCode, and the logs will appear on the given file.

Example: let's say you are in the directory where you cloned gonb repository, you can install your current version of GoNB set up to also log to the file /tmp/gonb.out with:

go run . --install --logtostderr --vmodule=goexec=2,specialcmd=2,cellmagic=2,gopls=2,connection=2 --extra_log=/tmp/gonb.out