SOLVED - Have vscode-jupyter do proper diffing in Git

[DennisL68]

When trying to use git versioning with Jupyter notebooks, you end up with heugh diffs because Jupyter uses a structured format, JSON, instead of plain text. So Git will do a binary "diff" instead.

One solution is to use GitHub - jupyter / nbdime along with git, but it would be so much easier if nbdime was part of the vscode-jupyter distribution. Then I wouldn't have to remember to set up nbdime when installing the Jupyter extension for vscode (git would of course be a prerequisite).

As explained at the nbdime Open Source project site:

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nbdime provides “content-aware” diffing and merging of Jupyter notebooks. It understands the structure of notebook documents. Therefore, it can make intelligent decisions when diffing and merging notebooks, such as:

• eliding base64-encoded images for terminal output
• using existing diff tools for inputs and outputs
• rendering image diffs in a web view
• auto-resolving conflicts on generated values such as execution counters

nbdime yields diffs like this:

vscode-jupyter already pulls additional exentsions on setup, such as Jupyter Keymap and Jupyter Notebook Renderers and of course .Net Interactive Notebooks...

[DonJayamanne]

Currently VS Code has a great diffing tool for Jupyter Notebooks, we don't just diff the JSON file, see here
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/datascience/jupyter-notebooks#_custom-notebook-diffing
Please try this if you haven't, and let us know what's missing or needs to be improved here.

[rebornix]

@lgonzalezsa @DonJayamanne it's on our iteration plan and I plan to implement this in Sept.

[lalitkumarj]

Hi. For some reason I don't see "Show metadata differences" and "show output differences" when I open the file from the git pane. It just opens as JSON. Any ideas on why this might happen?

[jparta]

@rebornix Are there updates on this feature?

[2-X]

i don't see any git features in VSCode's jupyter notebook previews at all. nor do i see settings. was this removed or am i just dumb?

[caph1993]

If you go to Explorer tab, click the file you are interested in, then click on Timeline in the bottom (below the files, in the explorer pane), then you can click on previous commits and see the changes with this special jupyter diff tool.

Sadly, this diff is not implemented everywhere (which should). For instance, I use git graph extension, and if I go and click some file in history and try to diff, the diff is in JSON mode and the options do not appear. Maybe this is what you are doing and this is why you don't see the options.

If you access from Explorer -> Timeline: Works 😊

If you access from git graph extension: Does not work ☹

[thoughtfuldata]

How to use the diffing tool as a merge tool?

[NicolaiLolansen]

It doesnt seem like the diff tool works once a merge-conflict arises. I found a related issue here: microsoft/vscode#160941