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The jOtter mascot, an otter holding a notepad

jOtter

A fast Jupyter notebook TUI. Open, edit and run real .ipynb notebooks in your terminal, with vim keys, inline plots and rendered LaTeX.
InstallYour first notebookGitHub

Why jOtter

Section titled “Why jOtter”

Your notebooks, untouched

Opens and saves .ipynb losslessly. Cell ids, metadata and fields written by other tools survive the round trip, so collaborators on JupyterLab never notice.

Fast

Redraws take single-digit microseconds. Cells are rendered once and cached, so holding a key down is a non-event, even in long notebooks full of plots.

Vim keys everywhere

Move between cells with j/k, edit with a modal editor, or let an embedded Neovim with your own config drive cell editing.

Plots and math in the terminal

matplotlib figures render inline through the kitty graphics protocol, and $…$ math renders as real equations. No TeX installation needed.

Any kernel

Runs any Jupyter kernelspec and finds your project’s virtualenv on its own: uv, poetry, conda, pixi, or anything else that installs ipykernel.

Hard to lose work

Atomic saves, autosave outside your repository, crash recovery, and a warning instead of a silent overwrite when the file changed on disk.

Install

Section titled “Install”
Terminal window
# download jotter_<version>_amd64.deb from the latest release, then:
sudo apt install ./jotter_*_amd64.deb

All options, including Alpine and aarch64, are in the installation guide.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”
Your first notebookCreate a notebook, run code, make a plot, save. Five minutes.
KeybindingsEvery key, on one page.
Terminal setupGet inline images and every key working in your terminal.
ConfigurationThemes, image sizes, autosave and the Neovim backend.
Compared with other toolseuporie, jpterm, jupyter-console and Neovim plugins: what each does best.