Jupyter Widgets

Release:7.7.2
Date:Sep 27, 2022

Jupyter Widgets are interactive browser controls for Jupyter notebooks. Examples include:

  • Basic form controls like sliders, checkboxes, text inputs
  • Container controls like tabs, accordions, horizontal and vertical layout boxes, grid layouts
  • Advanced controls like maps, 2d and 3d visualizations, datagrids, and more

Notebooks come alive when interactive widgets are used. Users can visualize and manipulate their data in intuitive and easy ways. Researchers can easily see how changing inputs to a model impact the results. Scientists can share interactive results with graphical user interfaces that others can play with without seeing code. Exploring, learning, and sharing becomes a fun immersive experience.

Core Jupyter Widgets

Jupyter Widgets is primarily a framework to provide interactive controls (see Simple Widget Introduction for more information). The ipywidgets package also provides a basic, lightweight set of core form controls that use this framework. These included controls include a text area, text box, select and multiselect controls, checkbox, sliders, tab panels, grid layout, etc.

The framework for building rich interactive objects is the foremost purpose of the Jupyter Widgets project, and the set of included core form controls is purposefully kept small and self-contained. We encourage and support a robust ecosystem of packages built on top of the Jupyter Widgets framework to provide more complicated interactive objects, such as maps, 2d and 3d visualizations, or other form control systems built on a variety of popular Javascript frameworks such as Material or Vue.

See the Jupyter Widgets wiki page for more information about custom widget packages built on top of the Jupyter Widgets framework.

Jupyter Widgets components

The Jupyter Widgets framework has several components:

  1. A package in the kernel to provide an interface for widgets. The ipywidgets Python package provides Jupyter Widgets for the IPython kernel. Other kernels may also provide Jupyter Widgets support.
  2. An extension for the browser Jupyter frontend to manage Jupyter Widgets. Installing ipywidgets automatically installs extensions for JupyterLab and Jupyter Notebook (the jupyterlab-widgets and widgetsnbextension packages). The Jupyter Widgets project also maintains a plain HTML interface for embedding Jupyter Widgets on a webpage, and many other frontends support Jupyter Widgets.

See the Jupyter Widgets wiki page for more information from the community about kernels and frontends that support Jupyter Widgets, as well as some custom widget packages built on top of the Jupyter Widgets framework.

Changelog and Migration

Developer Guide