Outlines of the Railway

This release makes me very proud. I redesigned the cell chrome, created a markdown pipeline, and brought back everyone's favorite ToC. The focus in 2.5 was around outputs: navigable tracebacks, explorable DataFrames, and keeping secrets out of the outputs. In the 2.6 release we're turning back to document operations. Long notebooks get more structure with a dedicated table of contents/outline, tooling like package selection moves into a dedicated rail with room for more, and additional editing controls.

Find your place in long notebooks

Click the outline view in the rail to hop between markdown segments and image outputs within your notebooks.

The outline shows your heading hierarchy and updates live as you edit.

Packages belong beside the notebook

Can we all agree that this is not how we should install dependencies in a notebook?

! [ -e /content ] && pip install -Uqq fastbook

Not everyone realized you could click Python/ to install deps into an nteract notebook. To make this more clear, packaging has been moved into the new rail. You can manage dependencies directly.

The big key with nteract though is to lean into your project's environment. Don't manage within the notebook itself, use the same dependencies you'll be using in production with your pyproject.toml, environment.yaml, or pixi.toml.

Hopefully now you'll be able to know the environment you have without needing a cell-shaped interruption in your notebook.

Markdown reads more like a document

Markdown got more serious in 2.6.

Bare TeX environments now project as math instead of plain text, completing compatibility with Jupyter notebooks. Write notebooks as they were intended, as a computational narrative that allows you to collaborate with others. Not just a pile of code cells.

As part of this release, there's a new Rust/WASM markdown engine. Users don't have to know about it, but it creates steadier parsing, better outline anchors, and very fast rendering. I'm hoping the document experience can go further from here.

Grand gestures of simplicity

After landing the rail work, it was clear there was opportunity to create clearer affordances for what you can do, what state a cell is in, and where the next action lives. Here's a tour of the small things we polished:

Hidden cells use clearer language

Motion on execution

Changing cell type

Right click a cell or use the menu to change its type in place.

Feature Flag Preview: Comments

This release has a still-in-development feature of commenting. If you want to try it out, turn on Enable Comments UI in Settings under Feature Flags. Select any code, rendered markdown, or outputs then leave a note. Leave replies in the discussion rail. This feature makes more sense when collaborating with users, which is why it's gated until hosted documents are available. However, you can start letting agents comment on your documents too.

What's next

Under the hood we've laid the foundations to extend the local realtime model to a real multiuser collaborative experience on the web, complete with attribution and identity backed by any OIDC provider.

More on this soon. Reach out on Twitter X, LinkedIn, or post a GitHub issue.

Technical changelog