📓 Notebooks

Notebooks have become a key part of many developer's and data scientist's workflow. With Visual Studio Code offering a rich, native notebook-editor, we're excited to enable a real-time collaboration experience, that will allow teams and classrooms to use notebooks and Live Share together.

The Live Share notebook experience is currently in preview, and therefore, has some pre-requisitions and known issues to be aware of. We'll be iterating rapidly on this initial preview release, and therefore, please don't hesitate to send us any questions/feedback) as you're evaluating it 👍

Pre-Requisites

Before you can start trying out collaborative notebooks, you need to install the following pre-requisites as part of this preview release:

Pre-Requisite	Host-Required?	Guest-Required?
Visual Studio Insiders	✅	✅
Live Share v1.0.3541+	✅	✅
The neccessary notebook extensions (e.g. Jupyter)	✅	N/A (Live Share takes care of this!)

Getting Started

Once you and your participants have the proper pre-requisites, you can start using Live Share and notebooks using the following steps:

1. Open a notebook within Visual Studio Code
2. Start a Live Share session
3. Once your guests join, you can start co-editing cells and seeing each other's cursors and text highlights
4. Have fun collaborating on notebooks! 🎉

Known Issues

The following list represents the set of known issues with the current Live Share notebook experience, along with their respective workarounds:

Issue	Workaround
"Follow mode" doesn't track scrolling within a notebook	We're working on proper "follow" support for notebooks, but in the meantime, you'll need to manually scroll to the right notebook cell you want to co-edit with your participants.
Adding/deleting/moving cells aren't synchronized amongst participants	Save the notebook document and have everyone re-open it. In the future, we'll fully synchronize notebook-level operations in real-time.
Notebook editors don't respect read-only Live Share sessions	While guests are able to edit notebook cells, they won't be able to actually save them to disk, and therefore, your security is retained in a read-only session.