Erys – A TUI for Jupyter Notebooks

Have you ever thought to yourself: “Wouldn’t it be nice to run Jupyter Notebooks in my terminal?” Well, you’re in luck. The new Erys project not only makes running Jupyter Notebooks in your terminal a reality, but Erys also lets you create and edit the notebooks in your terminal!

Erys is written using the fantastic Textual package. While Textual handles the front-end in much the same way as your browser would normally do, the jupyter-client handles the backend, which executes your code and manages your kernel.

Let’s spend a few moments learning more about Erys and taking it for a test drive.

Installation

The recommended method of installing Erys is to use the uv package manager. If you have uv installed, you can run the following command in your terminal to install the Erys application:

$ uv tool install erys

Erys also supports using pipx to install it, if you prefer.

Once you have Erys installed, you can run it in your terminal by executing the erys command.

Using Notebooks in Your Terminal

When you run Erys, you will see something like the following in your terminal:

This is an empty Jupyter Notebook. If you would prefer to open an existing notebook, you would run the following command:

erys PATH_TO_NOTEBOOK

If you passed in a valid path to a Notebook, you will see one loaded. Here is an example using my Python Logging talk Notebook:

You can now run the cells, edit the Notebook and more!

Wrapping Up

Erys is a really neat TUI application that gives you the ability to view, create, and edit Jupyter Notebooks and other text files in your terminal. It’s written in Python using the Textual package.

The full source code is on GitHub, so you can check it out and learn how it does all of this or contribute to the application and make it even better.

Check it out and give it a try!