Could VS Code be the teaching environment?

[jack89roberts]

Pros:

• It's a popular IDE (and the one most commonly used by REG)
• It has an in-built terminal and editor, can run notebooks and do git workflows etc. (with extensions)
• Could be a route to reducing weird notebook uses for writing files, running terminal commands, debugging etc.
• It's multi-platform

Cons:

• It's busier/more crowded than a Jupyter notebook
• Not sure it would take care of installing Python and bash/similar on, particularly on Windows, which may complicate setup
• The notebook extension is worse than native Jupyter notebooks/lab (in my opinion)
• Maybe more effort to keep the course website up to date (if more is being done outside the notebooks themselves)

[jemrobinson]

@callummole has also suggested JupyterHub as a possibility (I've invited him to Thursday's meeting to discuss this).

[jack89roberts]

I also wasn't intending to propose this for the next delivery as we have so much going on, but maybe one for the future.

[oC-n]

If this is implemented, a trap I just ran into in using VS Code for Jupyter Notebooks (because I couldn't get it to work reliably when served to a web browser as instructed) is that VS Code doesn't automatically configure each notebook to use the Python interpreter associated with the active environment. I have to manually select it for each one that I'd opened before realising the problem and assigning the correct interpreter to the workspace.

It seems from the VS Code documentation that it should automatically find the relevant interpreter for environments found by conda env list, but that didn't work for me. So it would be useful to give the tip on how to set the interpreter location for the workspace.