1  IDEs

An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a software application that offers extensive functionality for programmers, including ability to read, write, and execute code, develop and test software packages, etc.

IDEs may also allow viewing plots or launching web applications within the same environment, which are important for data science. An IDE can make coding easier, more productive, and, importantly, more fun.

1.1 VS Code

Visual Studio Code, a.k.a. VS Code is a source code editor and one of the most popular IDEs across different languages. The VS Code marketplace includes a very large number of extensions.

VS Code’s Julia extension is the official Julia extension that makes VS Code into a full-featured Julia IDE.

The Remote - SSH extension allows using a local VS Code installation (e.g. on your laptop) and executing code (R, Python, etc.) on a remote server on which you have SSH access.

VS Code’s Jupyter extension allows you to open and run jupyter notebooks.

1.2 Jupyter / Jupyter Lab

Jupyter is a popular notebook interface , which supports multiple programming languages, including Julia.

JupyterLab is the “next-generation web-based user interface for Project Jupyter”.

There are different ways to install jupyter and jupyter-lab.

One way is:

  1. Install mambaforge

  2. Use mamba to install jupyterlab:

#| eval: false
mamba install jupyterlab
  1. Install IJulia.jl:
Pkg.add("IJulia")
  1. Install the Julia kernel:
using IJulia
installkernel()

You can optionally install kernels with specified environment variables.

For example, install a julia kernel that uses 8 threads:

installkernel("Julia (8 threads)", env=Dict("JULIA_NUM_THREADS"=>"8"))

the same can be achieved by setting a shell environment variable, e.g. by adding the following to your shell’s config (.e.g ~/.zshrc)

#| eval: false
export JULIA_NUM_THREADS=8
  1. Start jupyter-lab:
#| eval: false
jupyter-lab