Consider recommending JupyterLab over plain Jupyter Notebooks in setup

[davidwilby]

Hi all!

In the setup instructions for this lesson, option A is Jupyter Notebooks, which I use for teaching the vast majority of the lesson.

However, later on, in command-line programs, learners are asked to use the bash shell. I believe that it might be beneficial to use JupyterLab throughout as a development environment since it offers notebooks, terminal, text editor etc in one tool, saving switching to any separate programs.

Since the setup instructions already recommend anaconda navigator as a route into Jupyter Notebooks, this wouldn't constitute a big change.

Interested to hear what others think and happy to make a PR if wanted.

Thanks!

[henryiii]

I can add the Jupyter authors have been trying to discourage the usage of notebook for years, as they wanted to only maintain one, and lab is the newer, better thing. They are currently replacing notebook with lab components (notebook v7 will be based on lab instead of the old code), so it didn't end up being killed off completely, but lab is very much the way to go. Even JupyterLite supports the lab interface. The lack of back-and-forth for file navigation and terminals is a clear win for learners, too - lab looks like R-Studio, etc.

[christopher-wild]

Hi,

Python Novice Gapminder already points to JupyterLab as the recommended development environment for the course.

Which I think is another reason to potentially swap to JupyterLab for this course, so there is more consistency in the setup and tools between the two similar courses.