nbcat 0.13.2

cat for jupyter notebooks

nbcat

nbcat let you preview Jupyter notebooks directly in your terminal. Think of it as cat, but for .ipynb files.

Features

• Very fast and lightweight with minimal dependencies.
• Preview remote notebooks without downloading them.
• Enable paginated view mode with keyboard navigation (similar to less).
• Supports image rendering (some protocols in beta)
• Supports for all Jupyter notebook versions, including old legacy formats.

Motivation

The idea of previewing notebooks in a terminal is not new - there have been many previous attempts to achieve it.
However, most are either slow and overengineered with a ton of half-working features, or they're outdated and incompatible with modern Python.

I was looking for a simple tool that let me quickly render Jupyter notebooks without switching context from my terminal window or installing a ton of dependencies.

Please note, that nbcat doesn't aim to replace JupyterLab. If you need a full-featured terminal experience, I recommend checking out euporie instead.

Installation

# Install from PyPI
pip install nbcat

# Install via Homebrew
brew tab akopdev/formulas/nbcat
brew install nbcat

Quickstart

$ nbcat notebook.ipynb

You can pass URLs as well.

$ nbcat https://raw.githubusercontent.com/akopdev/nbcat/refs/heads/main/tests/assets/test4.ipynb

Example use case with fzf command that lists all .ipynb files and uses nbcat for previewing them:

find . -type f -name "*.ipynb" | fzf --preview 'nbcat {}'

Testing & Development

Run the tests:

make test

Check code quality:

make format lint

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please open an issue or pull request.

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.

Useful Links

• 📘 Documentation: coming soon
• 🐛 Issues: GitHub Issues
• 🚀 Releases: GitHub Releases

---

Made with ❤️ by Akop Kesheshyan