Workspace setup

There are lots of different ways to run Python code and many tools to help you write it. You don’t require any special tools to create a Python script, a simple text editor like Notepad on Windows is sufficient. More advanced tools include things like Jupyter Notebooks and IDEs like PyCharm or Visual Studio Code.

For this workshop we will be keeping things as simple as possible in order to allow us to focus on the topics we’re learning without having to learn too many extra tools along the way.

We will not be using Jupyter Notebooks, but we will be using JupyterLab. JupyterLab is a web-based interactive development environment for notebooks, code, and data. It is an open-source project that provides a flexible and powerful interface for working with code and data.

Please follow our installation instructions

The way that we will be setting up the space is to have a text editor on the left-hand side of the screen and a terminal on the right hand side. We’ll use the editor to write our code and the terminal to run it.

In the launcher tab, scoll down to the “Text File” entry and click that. It will turn the editor into a text editor. Then go to File → New and select “Terminal”. It will now have two tabs inside the interface, one labelled “untitled.txt” and the other labelled “Terminal 1”:

The contents of the Terminal tab will likely be a little different on your computer, compared to what is shown in thise images but that is ok.

To make our lives easier, let’s rearange things so that we can see the text editor at the same time as the terminal. Do this by pressing and holding down the left mouse button on the tab that says “Terminal 1” and slowly dragging it to the right-hand side of the window. You’ll see a blue outline like this:

Release the mouse button and you’ll end up with the two showing side-by-side:

Make sure you are in the correct directory, as per our setup instructions.

e’re now ready to get started!