Jupyter Notebook Rich Diff Feedback #37376

gwincr11 · 2022-10-26T17:20:39Z

gwincr11
Oct 26, 2022

Hello and thank you for testing out the new Python Notebook Rich Diff feature. Please let us know if you see any issues, errors or room for improvement. ❤️

This is available as a feature preview

tcapelle · 2022-12-09T11:00:27Z

tcapelle
Dec 9, 2022

I want to be able to make comments on cells when reviewing notebooks

3 replies

Jemmawarren1993 Mar 3, 2025

I want to be able to make comments on cells when reviewing notebooks

Want my access recover with email and app

Ezechukwuebuka11 Jun 28, 2025

Hello and thank you for testing out the new Python Notebook Rich Diff feature. Please let us know if you see any issues, errors or room for improvement. ❤️

yalqt322-cmyk Dec 15, 2025

01040605451

krassowski · 2022-10-26T19:11:23Z

krassowski
Oct 26, 2022

This is really awesome, thank you for working on this! Some minor issues/suggestions for improvement:

Notebooks added for the first time in a commit are showing in a rich diff view which takes more screen estate and may be slower than simple rich display. Is this worth a special case (not sure here)?
I see a lot of "Metadata changed" messages even on newly added notebooks; maybe this could be less prominent, e.g. an icon on a side?
A dark theme support would be a great enhancement
I have many large notebooks and encountered "The notebook took too long to render." a few times. I would not mind having to click "wait a little longer" if it meant that I can see a diff for the larger notebooks, as usually those are the ones which I am most interested in diffing in the UI

5 replies

gwincr11 Oct 27, 2022
Author

Thanks for the feedback! We really appreciate it.

Notebooks added for the first time in a commit are showing in a rich diff view which takes more screen estate and may be slower than simple rich display. Is this worth a special case (not sure here)?

We choose this on purpose for reasons :), we actually started by showing the notebook but it may hinder longer term plans.

I see a lot of "Metadata changed" messages even on newly added notebooks; maybe this could be less prominent, e.g. an icon on a side?

We have discussed this as well, it is good to hear we are on the right track and will think about how to alleviate some of this in the layout.

A dark theme support would be a great enhancement

We are on the same page here.

I have many large notebooks and encountered "The notebook took too long to render." a few times. I would not mind having to click "wait a little longer" if it meant that I can see a diff for the larger notebooks, as usually those are the ones which I am most interested in diffing in the UI

This is a tricky balancing act for us. We have some ideas around how to speed up Notebook diff rendering and are currently working on performance, it would also be helpful to do some performance work on NbDime itself, @vidartf and I have discuss this issue in particular Support cell IDs jupyter/nbdime#553 I would love to see support for that land. I am also working on some threading/asyncio work on our side that could help with performance of certain fetching operations on our side. Performance work is always a preferred path to increasing timeouts for us, as timeout extension tends to cause issues at our scale.

ShaklEl3tar Nov 30, 2022

https://amazoon-eg.com/#/pages/records/index?type=1

HuangJunye Jul 5, 2023

Thanks for making this feature available! We have been using nbreview plugin to review jupyter notebooks but jumping between the two platforms is confusing. It's great to have the rich diff for jupyter notebook built-in on github. However, I have many notebooks that face "the notebook took too long to render" error which makes this feature unusable in most cases. I agree with the OP of this comment that longer notebooks are the ones that will benefits from the rich diff. I hope you can find a way to improve the performance.

p5fs5pk8q7-jpg Oct 13, 2025

37376

yalqt322-cmyk Dec 15, 2025

01040605451

robert-g-green · 2023-11-28T19:58:55Z

robert-g-green
Nov 28, 2023

Thanks for your work on this, great progress.

I've read several comments & responses about in-line comments and whether they are a worth implementing.

I'd like to add to previous comments that the ability to comment in-line is an essential feature. I would even go so far as to bluntly say (but with no rudeness intended) that if in-line comments were not added then the notebook rich diff rendering will have no purpose. The only reason I would use the diff feature is for PR review.

Adding in-line comments is the next priority.

2 replies

smith-kyle Dec 13, 2023

Shameless plug but GitNotebooks has inline notebook comments

ethompsy May 21, 2025

My team just rejected the use of .ipynb files in our codebase after trying this preview BECAUSE there is no in-line commenting feature.

tariqshihadah · 2025-04-17T14:25:02Z

tariqshihadah
Apr 17, 2025

I agree with others that in-line comments are an essential feature I'm looking for, though I'd add that cell-level comments would also be a major step in the right direction that would make a big difference for me and my team.

2 replies

PedramNavid Nov 21, 2025

Without being able to make comments, I can't use this feature, my primary use case is reviewing diffs and leaving comments!

yalqt322-cmyk Dec 15, 2025

01040605451 ابعت 500

sonja-hiltunen-ivadolabs · 2025-01-27T14:27:57Z

sonja-hiltunen-ivadolabs
Jan 27, 2025

This is a great feature! The main missing part for me to start using is the "comment" feature, that's crucial for code reviews.

1 reply

AlexJBisping Apr 16, 2025

I second this. We’d use the feature only if commenting on individual lines is possible; otherwise, it’s a non-starter.

Basic syntax highlighting would be nice too.

Thanks for adding this!

serghiou · 2022-11-23T04:04:20Z

serghiou
Nov 23, 2022

It's very exciting to be able to render notebooks appropriately! My thoughts so far:

As noted before, being able to provide comments in a notebook sent for PR is essential. Without such functionality, whether we can render a notebook appropriately or not is almost useless. Even if it weren't useless, we could render it as a notebook before in VS Code.
It's a shame that we cannot differentiate between a Markdown vs. a Code cell. Both look identical to us:

As you can see in the picture above:
a. It's difficult to know where one cell ends and another begins - there's a dark green line but that's very faint.
b. For some reason, this is a much stronger green than the beautiful green seen when reviewing a non-notebook file.
c. There are black lines between the numbers on the left - these do not look appealing and are not there in non-notebook files.

Really looking forward to further support for notebooks!

0 replies

ignacio-amaya-rovio · 2025-04-17T08:40:57Z

ignacio-amaya-rovio
Apr 17, 2025

Is this still in preview? Are there plans to make this part of standard offering any time soon?

0 replies

scottamain · 2023-08-18T00:50:45Z

scottamain
Aug 18, 2023

Thank you for building this functionality! Jupyter notebooks are increasingly a common documentation and programming format and your support for it is much appreciated!

As others have said, the major missing feature for productivity is the ability to make in-line comments in a PR review. I can appreciate how this is a non-trivial feature because you need to match the comments to the exact lines in the "source code," so I wish you god speed on this one. Thank you! 🙏 ❤️

1 reply

amit1rrr May 23, 2025

the major missing feature for productivity is the ability to make in-line comments in a PR review

ReviewNB offers in-line commenting for notebook diffs on GitHub PRs. It's a GitHub marketplace app.

It would be ideal to have native support for this in GitHub, meanwhile, ReviewNB has been a reliable alternative for the last 6+ years. We're completely free for open source & academic use—here are some popular OSS repos using ReviewNB.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of ReviewNB. I've been tracking this community discussion since inception and see many familiar faces of our users here (hello 👋). Since inline commenting has come up often here, I just wanted to share an existing alternative—shared in the spirit of being more helpful than promotional.

vlad-regal · 2023-10-02T14:43:27Z

vlad-regal
Oct 2, 2023

While this is nice for viewing diffs you don't have access to line comment when reviewing PR's that have Jupyter notebooks so you end up switching between the 2 views. If adding inline review comments is hard to implement at least add a toggle between the 2 views on the PR page.

2 replies

scottamain Oct 2, 2023

If adding inline review comments is hard to implement at least add a toggle between the 2 views on the PR page.

@vlad-regal It is there, at the top corner of each file (I also didn't discover this easily):

ethompsy May 21, 2025

If adding inline review comments is hard to implement at least add a toggle between the 2 views on the PR page.

@vlad-regal It is there, at the top corner of each file (I also didn't discover this easily):

This just takes us back to the near unreadable text view which was already rejected by my team because it makes PRs miserable.

j-gooding · 2023-05-20T17:34:02Z

j-gooding
May 20, 2023

Thank you for starting to integrate nbdime; I've wanted something like this for years.

I have two main pieces of feedback:

I don't really care about metadata differences. I'm not sure if I ever have or will. I can imagine it is very important for some people, though. It would be good if there were a user-configurable preference for whether metadata should be collapsed by default.
I'm an academic researcher. Most of our notebooks are used for data analysis on large physics datasets. Our notebooks can be 10,000+ lines long to generate highly detailed walk-through reports for a given experiment. I'm unable to view the diffs for nearly all of my notebooks because they are too big and getting timeout errors. Obviously, faster is better, but I don't care how long the diff takes to load so long as it eventually loads. Otherwise, I have to use offline tools, which defeats the purpose and removes the convenience.

Again, thank you so much for working on this. I can't wait to see where it goes.

5 replies

gwincr11 May 22, 2023
Author

Thanks for the feedback.

As for Metadata be closed by default I think this is an NbDime request.

Large notebooks are very hard for us to handle due to scaling needs of GitHub and ensuring long running notebook renders do not overtake shorter ones. There is some work on the NbDime side to improve the diffing algorithm which may help us support larger notebooks so that maybe worth following with, the pr is currently in progress last I checked.

jupyter/nbdime#639 and jupyter/nbdime#402

krassowski Jul 5, 2023

FYI, I added results for benchmarks on cell ID PR in jupyter/nbdime#639 (comment) if you are interested. The speedup for a large notebook (1000 cells) goes from x2.5 speedup for naive case of no changes to as much as x150 when all cells are changed (from over 6 minutes to about 2.5 seconds). I also opened a PR to to expose the cell ID to frontend (vidartf/nbdime#3) to help in finishing that work. @gwincr11 if you have any comments on that I am happy to help with moving it forward.

krassowski Nov 21, 2023

jupyter/nbdime#639 was merged and released in nbdime 4.0.0. Due to packaging issues the version to install is 4.0.1 (4.0.0 was yanked).

krassowski Dec 13, 2023

Just out of curiosity, did you have a chance to look at the new version? Any blockers for upgrade?

gwincr11 Dec 13, 2023
Author

Thanks for checking in @krassowski I was able to updated us late last week and everything went smoothly. Thank you and the team for the smooth update! ❤️

daithi-walker · 2025-02-04T01:05:49Z

daithi-walker
Feb 4, 2025

This doesn't seem to work for me or others in my org. We've enabled the feature and I've toggled between source and rich view but nothing.

1 reply

yalqt322-cmyk Dec 15, 2025

01040605451 ابعت 500

alexscott-ff · 2023-04-28T16:44:08Z

alexscott-ff
Apr 28, 2023

I'm not able to highlight and select (to copy) the text in the rich diff. Is that expected? On latest Chrome OS X.

7 replies

asmeurer Jun 23, 2023

Had to completely disable this and switch over to just reviewing JSON because of this + no line-by-line comments. It's basically unusable for doing actual reviewing.

matthewfeickert Aug 18, 2023

I 100% agree with @asmeurer here. It totally defeats the purpose of review if I can't make comments

without rich Jupyter notebook diffs
with rich Jupyter notebook diffs

@gwincr11 given your comments here https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/37376#discussioncomment-4788256 it seems like it would be possible for this to be released as a feature without having commenting enabled. If so, this would totally break review for many of us, so will there be a way to disable this as a feature if this decision is made?

gwincr11 Aug 18, 2023
Author

You can toggle between code view and the rich diff view, and comments will continue to work on the source view.

gwincr11 Aug 18, 2023
Author

File level commenting is also an option if you are ok with less granular comments https://github.blog/changelog/2023-03-14-comment-on-files-in-a-pull-request-public-beta/

matthewfeickert Aug 18, 2023

You can toggle between code view and the rich diff view, and comments will continue to work on the source view.

Ah okay.

I had missed that, but that's a decent workaround for now. Thanks for pointing that out.

File level commenting is also an option if you are ok with less granular comments https://github.blog/changelog/2023-03-14-comment-on-files-in-a-pull-request-public-beta/

While having the ability to give file level comments is useful, it is not a suitable replacement for review.

terekete · 2023-03-16T02:48:30Z

terekete
Mar 16, 2023

It would be amazing if this diff has a feature to strip outputs on notebooks, an on or off toggle.

1 reply

tariqshihadah Jun 7, 2023

Agree! Much of the time the outputs of cells are incidental and expected to change every time the notebook gets run (due to timestamps among other things). What really counts for our team is just the code.

joelostblom · 2022-11-18T21:48:47Z

joelostblom
Nov 18, 2022

Overall this is so great! One big issue when teaching how to work with notebooks is that students find it intimidating to version control them and this will help a lot to make that process friendlier.

Expand notebook metadata by default (cell metadata can remain collapsed as it is now). It is easy to miss this otherwise on top of the notebook and there can be significant changes here that are nice to see by default.
I really like that text is softwrapped for markdown cells just as it is for markdown documents, makes it much easier to read! I am not as fond of it for code cells, but if there this is an all or nothing situation then I think it is better to keep it as is and wrap both code and text.
It seems like I can't comment on individual lines in the rich diff? I don't see the blue plus sign show up when I hover
Sometimes there are big whitespaces on both the left and right hand side which I don't really know what they mean:
It's really nice to see visualizations show up in the diff when a chart is changed! I think it would be great to support this for libraries that create visualizations that rely on web technologies rather than images as well. I am mainly thinking about Vega/Vega-Lite/Altair myself, but there are many others such as Bokeh, Plotly, etc. It would be great if these are both rendered in notebooks by default and show up in rich diffs as well. Examples of a notebook where altair visualization do not show up https://github.com/joelostblom/altair_ally/blob/main/doc/examples.ipynb.
There seems to be an issue with marking output as changed when it is actually only output metadata such as execution count that has changed. In the example below you can see that there the entire output chunk is marked as changed in the rich diff, there is actually nothing changed in the actual output, just the output metadata as we can see in the source diff. I can't make this notebook public, but I have invited you to the repo @gwincr11

3 replies

gwincr11 Nov 21, 2022
Author

Thanks for the wonderful feedback, we are reviewing it all and considering some changes.

Here is a few notes from our review:

Expand notebook metadata by default (cell metadata can remain collapsed as it is now). It is easy to miss this otherwise on top of the notebook and there can be significant changes here that are nice to see by default.

Many new notebooks, diffing a brand new notebook, we have seen have thousands of lines of meta data at this level, showing it all the time is sometimes a very bad user experience. This is why we have chosen to toggle it. Is this useful to expand on changed notebooks?

I really like that text is softwrapped for markdown cells just as it is for markdown documents, makes it much easier to read! I am not as fond of it for code cells, but if there this is an all or nothing situation then I think it is better to keep it as is and wrap both code and text.

We will maintain softwrapping as this is how GitHub code diffs also behave.

It seems like I can't comment on individual lines in the rich diff? I don't see the blue plus sign show up when I hover

We would love to support commenting, but do not at this time.

Sometimes there are big whitespaces on both the left and right hand side which I don't really know what they mean:

Can you provide an example diff so we can see this?

It's really nice to see visualizations show up in the diff when a chart is changed! I think it would be great to support this for libraries that create visualizations that rely on web technologies rather than images as well. I am mainly thinking about Vega/Vega-Lite/Altair myself, but there are many others such as Bokeh, Plotly, etc. It would be great if these are both rendered in notebooks by default and show up in rich diffs as well. Examples of a notebook where altair visualization do not show up

We would love to get something working with this. Our current priority is ensure that all Notebook renders/diffs are as secure as possible. Rendering user submitted javascript is an attack vector we have to take very seriously, so we have chosen to remove this content at this time.

There seems to be an issue with marking output as changed when it is actually only output metadata such as execution count that has changed. In the example below you can see that there the entire output chunk is marked as changed in the rich diff, there is actually nothing changed in the actual output, just the output metadata as we can see in the source diff. I can't make this notebook public, but I have invited you to the repo

This is an issue that should be opened with nbdiff. I can try to get around to it some time soon.

joelostblom Nov 26, 2022

Is this useful to expand on changed notebooks?

I agree that seeing thousands of lines of metadata is not useful in notebooks. I don't know what all this metadata is about and was primarily thinking that it would be useful to see things such as if the kernel (and maybe the Python version was changed), since this could lead to how the notebook runs on your own system if you don't pay careful attention to it and change it back locally.

Can you provide an example diff so we can see this?

The source diff looks like this (it is in the PR of the repo I invited you to). It seems like in this case there is actually a markdown cell with two <br> tags in it which is what generates the spacing. That is probably pretty uncommon to be used in notebooks, so probably no action required here.

This is an issue that should be opened with nbdiff. I can try to get around to it some time soon.

That would be great, thank you!

joelostblom Nov 26, 2022

Also, I do think providing a commenting feature is a big one as I can see it being a not so great user experience to toggle between the rich diff for viewing the changes and then the source diffs for adding comments. I think I would have two windows open side to side to deal with this effectively myself.

bicepjai · 2023-08-02T19:01:04Z

bicepjai
Aug 2, 2023

Is this available on GitHub enterprise ?

1 reply

Ryan-Draves Aug 16, 2023

I am also interested in this being released for GHES; it'd be a huge help for reviewing notebook changes

nicocanali · 2022-11-03T14:30:20Z

nicocanali
Nov 3, 2022

Another small inconvenience is that the "expand all" button doesn't work at the moment

Expanding manually (by section), however, does work:

1 reply

nicocanali Nov 3, 2022

Also interesting is that the expand all button doesn't always show: for example, a PR with multiple files shows it, a PR with a single file doesn't 🤷

cgravill · 2025-05-23T12:29:51Z

cgravill
May 23, 2025

We remove a lot of metadata from our notebooks to avoid churn between people. We recently found folks who are using this preview were having issues as we'd removed 'display_name'. This apparently leads to failure in diffing:

might you be able to make that optional as it doesn't seem essential for a diff?

2 replies

krassowski May 23, 2025

display_name is currently required in the notebook format, see here. You may wish to propose making this optional over in nbformat, but there may be more tools and notebook clients which assume that this is always available, so it could be a breaking change.

cgravill May 23, 2025

Thanks for that, we should probably stop removing it then. So far we've not run into any issues with other tools.

Gharalast · 2025-09-08T17:07:02Z

Gharalast
Sep 8, 2025

Hello and thank you for testing out the new Python Notebook Rich Diff feature. Please let us know if you see any issues, errors or room for improvement. ❤️

This is available as a feature preview

0 replies

Gharalast · 2025-09-08T17:07:14Z

Gharalast
Sep 8, 2025

0 replies

mcimerman-tdv · 2025-11-26T07:20:50Z

mcimerman-tdv
Nov 26, 2025

Cannot comment on PR diffs when rich ipynb feature is enabled.

0 replies

joelostblom · 2022-11-19T01:14:34Z

joelostblom
Nov 19, 2022

It also seems like I can't edit notebooks directly in the web editor any longer which I believe I could before:

Without the rich diff feedback enabled (our enterprise server)

Github.com after opting in to enable the rich diff feedback:

0 replies

timatim · 2023-01-05T16:16:11Z

timatim
Jan 5, 2023

Is this sign-up form still valid? I signed up two days ago and still don't see rich diffs

2 replies

therzka Jan 7, 2023

you're in!

timatim Jan 9, 2023

thank you! will post feedback soon

AlexanderLanin · 2023-08-15T08:14:20Z

AlexanderLanin
Aug 15, 2023

Any plans for extensions / API to use this UI for other custom diffs? e.g. PlantUML is sometimes difficult to review in text form.

0 replies

zmbc · 2023-08-01T19:52:54Z

zmbc
Aug 1, 2023

This is a cool feature!

Two issues I've run into:

Maybe this only happens when running notebooks in VS Code, but for me if I insert cells and re-run, the execution count updates both on the later cells and on their outputs. This is invisible metadata but it still causes the rich diff to mark it as "Outputs changed." See an example here: https://github.com/zmbc/reviewnb-test/pull/3/files
Maybe related, but for very short outputs, when I hover over them, the "show source" tooltip covers the added output itself like so:

0 replies

Dadiselef20 · 2023-05-31T11:17:15Z

Dadiselef20
May 31, 2023

Pull request

0 replies

Ab2nour · 2023-03-02T12:21:36Z

Ab2nour
Mar 2, 2023

Hello,

I was exactly looking for this feature two days ago (and thus installed Nbdev plugin for my account), thank you!

I may have found one bug, I cannot see the diffs on Firefox:

Screenshot of "no diff"

And I get this in the console:

Error log in the console

Content Security Policy: Les paramètres de la page ont empêché le chargement d’une ressource à inline (« script-src »). first.js:148:29
MathJax: Invalid option "autoload" (no default value). tex-chtml-full.js:1:834117
[iframe] Error parsing message data. SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 2 of the JSON data
    getMessageContents iframe.ts:28
    _receive2 iframe.ts:82
    init iframe.ts:104
    init iframe.ts:103
    _callee$ index.ts:55
    tryCatch runtime.js:64
    invoke runtime.js:299
    defineIteratorMethods runtime.js:124
    diff_asyncGeneratorStep diff-acfa0579b5eb2567eb0c.js:171151
    _next diff-acfa0579b5eb2567eb0c.js:171152
    diff_asyncToGenerator diff-acfa0579b5eb2567eb0c.js:171152
    diff_asyncToGenerator diff-acfa0579b5eb2567eb0c.js:171152
    _initializeDiff index.ts:97
    initializeDiff index.ts:21
    <anonymous> index.ts:99
    <anonymous> diff-acfa0579b5eb2567eb0c.js:171281
    <anonymous> diff-acfa0579b5eb2567eb0c.js:171283

This may be an issue with Firefox though?

Because on Chromium, it works perfectly fine!

OS & Firefox version

Mozilla Firefox 110.0.1

Operating System: Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS              
Kernel: Linux 5.19.0-32-generic
Architecture: x86-64

Please do not hesitate to ask me for additional information if it can help.

2 replies

therzka Mar 2, 2023

Yep, seems like a Firefox issue if it works in Chrome. I'll take a look! Thanks for helping us out!

therzka Mar 3, 2023

ok looks like the issue here is that this is a huge notebook and the diff is taking a long time to generate in Firefox. If you notice, when you switch to the raw view, we don't display the raw diff at all.

2024-07-09T14:30:42Z

github-actions[bot]
bot Jul 9, 2024

💬 Your Product Feedback Has Been Submitted 🎉

Thank you for taking the time to share your insights with us! Your feedback is invaluable as we build a better GitHub experience for all our users.

Here's what you can expect moving forward ⏩

Your input will be carefully reviewed and cataloged by members of our product teams.
- Due to the high volume of submissions, we may not always be able to provide individual responses.
- Rest assured, your feedback will help chart our course for product improvements.
Other users may engage with your post, sharing their own perspectives or experiences.
GitHub staff may reach out for further clarification or insight.
- We may 'Answer' your discussion if there is a current solution, workaround, or roadmap/changelog post related to the feedback.

Where to look to see what's shipping 👀

Read the Changelog for real-time updates on the latest GitHub features, enhancements, and calls for feedback.
Explore our Product Roadmap, which details upcoming major releases and initiatives.

What you can do in the meantime 💻

Upvote and comment on other user feedback Discussions that resonate with you.
Add more information at any point! Useful details include: use cases, relevant labels, desired outcomes, and any accompanying screenshots.

As a member of the GitHub community, your participation is essential. While we can't promise that every suggestion will be implemented, we want to emphasize that your feedback is instrumental in guiding our decisions and priorities.

Thank you once again for your contribution to making GitHub even better! We're grateful for your ongoing support and collaboration in shaping the future of our platform. ⭐

0 replies

This comment was marked as spam.

Sign in to view

Jupyter Notebook Rich Diff Feedback #37376

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Replies: 45 comments · 72 replies

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

gwincr11 Oct 27, 2022 Author

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

gwincr11 May 22, 2023 Author

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

Replies: 45 comments 72 replies

gwincr11 Oct 27, 2022
Author

gwincr11 May 22, 2023
Author