DS: Users can spin up multiple "Python Interactive" windows

[greazer]

No description provided.

[djbarker]

Surprised how quiet a ticket on this issue is, this would be a great feature I find myself wanting often. After all, it's usual to have several Jupyter notebooks open at once.

[michaeloc]

I agree with @djbarker! It's very normal to open more than one jupyter notebook.

[s3and0s]

I would appreciate this feature too.

[janosh]

I could really use this as well!

@greazer Would this be difficult? Otherwise I might have a go at it.

[amkrous]

I used to work with multiple jupyter kernels in web browser. But when i came to Vscode i miss this feature.

[zhaopinglu]

This feature will be useful for complicate cases. like testing client/server programs.

[evian13]

I would really need this to be implemented
With VS code it is complicated when you are working on different projects. I don't want to reload again and again
thanks

[Chris-Tierney]

surprised this isn't available, its definitely needed.

[rchiodo]

Moving back to triage. LOTS of up votes on this one.

Implementation wise, here's some thoughts:

• We'd have to tie each interactive window to a file (much like notebook editors are)
• Opening/closing them would pretty much match notebook editors
• Not sure what we do about save/close? Maybe not worry about it as we don't save state anyway. Although probably shouldn't reset the kernel on close like we do for notebooks.

[rchiodo]

Moving back to triage based on number of up votes

[ruilvo]

Commenting to upvote the idea!

[syagev]

The data-science tools in Python+VSCode are awesome. Unfortunately, it feels like in one of the latest updates we've regressed a bit on this issue.. now switching a jupyter server requires a reload of VS Code, making it much harder to work with multiple kernels (e.g. one local, and one remote) simultaneously.

This issue is still in the DS: Q1 2020 Releases milestone, is it indeed expected soon? Is there a good best-practice for the requirement of easily switching between remote and local kernels? Multiple VSCode windows?

Thanks!!

[rchiodo]

@syagev your best bet for using multiple interactive windows at the same time right now is multiple VS code windows. If you need to open the same folder more than once, you can have VS code open it first and VS code insider's open it again. HTH.

It's unlikely issue microsoft/vscode-python#3104 will be resolved any time soon though.

[carlosalop]

Hoping this gets implemented, I'm just starting with vscode and I really like it, but I miss running different files at the same time.

[victorsmoliveira]

Really looking forward to this feature. Any updates?

[rchiodo]

Sorry but this is not currently on our radar. Please up vote it.

[franz101]

I can not live without this feature

[rchiodo]

Some thoughts on how this might work

1. User opens interactive window by running a cell
2. Interactive window opens and is associated with that file
3. User runs cell from another file
4. Prompt shows up asking (do you want to open a new interactive window for this file with a yes, always, no)
5. User picks always, new window opens, setting is written for 'openNewInteractiveWindow'

We would change the 'Show Python Interactive Window' command to 'Create new Python Interactive Window'.

If a user then runs yet another file, same prompt appears if they didn't say always.
If the user runs a cell in one of the original files, it activates the matching interactive window.

How does the user tell which 'file' is associated with each interactive window? I think we'd put an item in the toolbar like the server:

[rchiodo]

@claudiaregio had another idea for the association of a file. Add it to the tab title itself.

[syagev]

@rchiodo would it be possible to have each Interactive Window also have a different Jupyter Server? I'd like to reiterate a use-case which IMO is extremely useful for DS/ML research, where you have a couple of Interactive Windows open - one with a local server and one with a remote (usually substantially more powerful) remote.

This way you can easily switch between prototyping code that requires heavy compute (e.g. a deep-learning training script) on your local computer, and actually running the training session on the GPU-enabled remote.

[rchiodo]

@rchiodo would it be possible to have each Interactive Window also have a different Jupyter Server?

Sorry but we don't have a facility for having more than one 'server' in use at the same time. You'd have to do this with two VS code windows opened with different folders.

Sounds like that would be useful for notebooks as well (not just the interactive window). We should support being able to pick a server per notebook/interactive window session (like we allow picking kernels).

[joyceerhl]

@rchiodo was trying to validate this. While I can create multiple interactive windows, there's an odd issue where if you open two IWs side by side and focus one of them by clicking in the input box, focus appears to skitter back and forth between the IWs, making it impossible to type into either input box 😕 This may be caused by a vscode bug, but I know we do some focus management for the IW too, so just wanted to bring this up and see if you noticed this as well.

[rchiodo]

No I did not see that happen for me. I can try it now. Please enter another bug for it.

[rchiodo]

I don't see that happening for me. Are you using insiders VS code or stable?

[joyceerhl]

Was on stable 1.47.0, updated to stable 1.47.2 and everything LGTM now. Validated 😊