The Studio notebook view

What the Studio view is for

Every Jupyter notebook in CoCalc can be shown in two ways. The classic view is the familiar cell-oriented notebook. The Studio view is a content-first layout for the same live notebook: results and prose get the main column, source code moves into a narrow column beside them, and navigation aids make long notebooks easier to move through.

Studio supports editing and running cells, collaborating, and chatting in the same live notebook. Its layout and navigation controls differ from the classic view.

Use Studio when you are reading through results, presenting a notebook, working on a long document-style notebook, or when the code matters less than what it produced.

Switch between the views

Switch a notebook frame with the Studio and Classic buttons in the notebook header, or from View → Switch to Studio Notebook View.

Both views act on the same notebook, so you can switch at any time without losing state. Because this is a frame in the frame editor, you can also split the view and keep a classic frame and a Studio frame open side by side on the same notebook, or combine either with a terminal or another editor.

Side-by-side layout

Output is on the left, code on the right. This keeps the focus on results while the code stays accessible. Hover over the code column to reveal run and action buttons for that cell.

Reading mode

Turn on Reading mode to hide code cells entirely and show only outputs and markdown. This is useful for presenting a notebook or reading through results.

Reading mode does not make the notebook read-only. Double-click an output, or use the pencil button, to edit the cell behind it.

Layout widths

Use the width control in the notebook header to switch between:

1. Wide — full frame width.
2. Comfortable — centered, with room for the mini table of contents.
3. Narrow — compact and centered.

Narrower widths trade horizontal space for line length that is easier to read. Which widths are offered depends on how much room the frame has.

Sections

A markdown cell that begins with a heading — # through #### — starts a section. The section holds that heading cell and every cell after it up to the next heading. Cells before the first heading form an opening section of their own.

That is the whole mechanism. There is no section metadata, no special cell type, and nothing to configure: write headings as you go and the notebook gains structure. Sections are what make the rest of this page work, so a notebook with headings is markedly easier to navigate, run, and fold than one long undifferentiated run of cells.

Once a notebook has headings you can:

1. Jump to any section from the mini table of contents.
2. Run a whole section at once.
3. Run the cells above or below a cell without leaving its section.
4. Fold a section down to its heading.
5. See at a glance whether anything inside a folded section is running or failed.

Navigate long notebooks

At comfortable and narrow widths, a floating mini table of contents appears in the left margin, built from those headings. Click an entry to jump to that section. Double-click it to run every code cell in the section.

A minimap on the right shows the shape of the whole notebook and the run state of each cell, so you can see which parts have run, failed, or are still running without scrolling.

Fold sections

Fold a section down to its heading with the control on the heading itself, or by clicking the section line in the left gutter. Folding is a display choice and does not change the notebook: the cells are still there and still run.

A folded section keeps reporting itself. Its heading and its minimap entry show when a cell inside is running or has raised an error, so long computations stay visible while folded away.

Run controls

The run button on each cell has a dropdown. In a notebook with sections it offers both scopes:

1. Run above in section and Run cell and below in section stop at the section boundary.
2. Run all above and Run all below cover the whole notebook.

Section-scoped runs are the reason headings pay off while you work, not only when you read: they let you re-run the part of the notebook you are editing without waiting for everything before or after it.

Use Shift+Enter to run cells, Escape and Enter to switch between command and edit mode, and arrow keys to navigate.

Agents in the Studio view

The Agent button in the title bar opens an AI agent that works on the open notebook: ask questions about it, generate or fix cells, and debug errors. Hovering over a code cell also offers a per-cell agent action scoped to just that cell.

For more on agents and notebooks, see Use Jupyter notebooks.

Why this matters in CoCalc

A notebook is used for two different things: writing computations and reading the results of them. The classic view is built for the first, and the Studio view is built for the second, without forking the document or exporting it. The notebook stays live, collaborative, and editable in both.