Improve your Notebook Skills! 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!

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..).

Let’s see the definition from the docs.

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

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 using 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.