what is the difference between jupyter notebook an

Question

I am new to jupyter notebook,what is the key difference between the jupyter notebook and jupyter lab,suggest me to choose the best one,which should be used in future.

Answer 1

Jupyter Notebook is a web-based interactive computational environment for creating Jupyter notebook documents. It supports several languages like Python (IPython), Julia, R etc. and is largely used for data analysis, data visualization and further interactive, exploratory computing.

JupyterLab is the next-generation user interface including notebooks. It has a modular structure, where you can open several notebooks or files (e.g. HTML, Text, Markdowns etc) as tabs in the same window. It offers more of an IDE-like experience.

For a beginner I would suggest starting with Jupyter Notebook as it just consists of a filebrowser and an (notebook) editor view. It might be easier to use. If you want more features, switch to JupyterLab. JupyterLab offers much more features and an enhanced interface, which can be extended through extensions: JupyterLab Extensions (GitHub)

Answer 2

At this time (mid 2019), with JupyterLab 1.0 release, as a user, I think we should adopt JupyterLab for daily use. And from the JupyterLab official documentation:

The current release of JupyterLab is suitable for general daily use.

and

JupyterLab will eventually replace the classic Jupyter Notebook. Throughout this transition, the same notebook document format will be supported by both the classic Notebook and JupyterLab.

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Note that JupyterLab has a extensible modular architecture. So in the old days, there is just one Jupyter Notebook, and now with JupyterLab (and in the future), Notebook is just one of the core applications in JupyterLab (along with others like code Console, command-line Terminal, and a Text Editor).