Feature overview

The following features are specific to Jupyter notebooks. There is also a CoCalc jupyter documentation.

Collaborative editing

You can share your Jupyter notebooks privately with project collaborators. All modifications are synchronized in real time, where you can see the cursors of others while they edit the document. You are also notified about the presence of watching collaborators.

Even sliders, menus and knobs of interactive widgets are synchronized among all collaborators.

Additionally, the status and results of all computations in the currently running kernel session are also synchronized, because the session runs remotely in CoCalc's cluster.

Together, everyone involved experiences the document in exactly the same way.

Time-Travel

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The Time-travel feature is specific to the CoCalc platform. It records all your changes in the Jupyter notebook in fine detail. You can go back and forth in time across hundreds of changes to recover your previous edits.

This allows you to easily recover parts of previous versions of your file, by copy/pasting the part you accidentally changed.

You can also relive the entire process of creating the notebook from the start. This lets you discover how you arrived at a particular solution and see what you (or your student) tried before.

Native Jupyter Notebooks

CoCalc offers a complete rewrite of the classical Jupyter notebook interface. It is tightly integrated into CoCalc and adds real-time collaboration, time-travel history and much more.

This rewrite does not change the underlying Jupyter notebook file format. Therefore, you can download your *.ipynb file at any time and continue working in another environment.

Despite that, there is also support for the "Classical notebook". This assures that you can still use all libraries relying on the specifics of that implementation. CoCalc does add collaborative editing and a chat, too.

Chat panel

A side-by-side chat for each Jupyter file gives you the ability to discuss the content with your colleagues or students.

Collaborators who are not online will be notified about new messages the next time they sign in.

Chat supports markdown formatting and LaTeX formulas.

Managed kernels

CoCalc makes sure that your desired computational environment is available and ready to work with. You just have to select from many pre-installed and fully managed kernels to start with your work.

Look at our list of available software for more details.

CPU and memory monitoring

Long running notebook sessions or intense computations might deplete available CPU or memory resources. This slows down all calculations or even causes an unexpected termination of the current session.

This indicator helps you to keep an eye on the notebook's memory and CPU consumption.

Backups

Every couple of minutes, all files in your project are saved in consistent read-only snapshots.

This means you can always recover older versions of your files in case they got corrupted or accidentally deleted.

Publishing

CoCalc helps you sharing your work with the world. It offers its own hosting of shared documents, which includes Jupyter notebooks and any other associated data files.

Under the hood, CoCalc uses a novel renderer which generates a static HTML representation on the server side and even includes pre-rendered LaTeX formulas. This approach does not suffer from the same shortcomings as other solutions based on nbconvert.

Collaborative online Jupyter Notebooks