JupyterLab is now faster thanks to improvements like CSS rule optimization, CodeMirror 6, MathJax 3, and windowing. JupyterLab 4 is more efficient than JupyterLab 3 at handling large notebooks by only rendering the portion of the notebook that fits in the web browser's viewport.
Here are some of the major new features in JupyterLab 4.0:
- Upgraded Text Editor: CodeMirror, the text editor for cell and file editors, has been updated to CodeMirror 6. This brings important accessibility and performance improvements, as well as better customization capabilities. The editor's settings have also been improved to make it more powerful and flexible.
- Real Time Collaboration (RTC): moved to a separate package - jupyter\_collaboration, version 1.0.0 of which is now released. Highlights include support for displaying multiple cursors and selections, and support for registering new shared model types.
- New Extension Manager: In JupyterLab 4, the Extension Manager includes pre-built Python extensions and extensions from pypi.org. Installing from PyPI eliminates the need for a build when using the extension manager to install the extension.
- Improved document search: When searching in notebooks, the search and replace functionality has received new improvements, including highlighting matches in rendered markdown cells, searching within the current selection, searching across multiple lines, and replacing while preserving case.
- Accessibility improvements: including improved focus and keyboard navigation in the file browser, more ARIA roles and tabs for UI elements, and the main menu collapsing into a hamburger menu if there is not enough room to display all items.
- Dev tools updates: TypeScript v5, Yarn v3, React v18, and Lumino v2. It is recommended to use Node.js v18 or newer to ensure that the version you are using will continue to receive updates until at least the end of 2023.
- Bug Fixes: Over 100 bugs have been resolved, enhancing the stability and performance of JupyterLab.
More details can be viewed: https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/releases/tag/v4.0