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I'd like to have a default indentation size of 2 spaces instead of 4 spaces in my Jupyter notebooks. How can I do this?

Note: this is not a duplicate of How do I change the autoindent to 2 space in IPython notebook, as that question is for (deprecated) IPython notebooks and not (current) Jupyter notebooks.

Ken Williams
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rd11
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1 Answers1

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The correct way to do this is in bpirvu's buried answer to How do I change the autoindent to 2 space in IPython notebook:

Just edit ~/.jupyter/nbconfig/notebook.json. Here is a complete notebook.json which includes the relevant setting:

{
  "CodeCell": {
    "cm_config": {
      "indentUnit": 2
    }
  }
}

There's also a more hacky solution that's more prevalent around the web, probably because the Jupyter documentation is lacking on this topic and indentUnit is only mentioned here: http://jupyter-notebook.readthedocs.io/en/latest/frontend_config.html. This solution is to open your browser's JavaScript console and enter

var cell = Jupyter.notebook.get_selected_cell();
var config = cell.config;
var patch = {
      CodeCell:{
        cm_config:{indentUnit:2}
      }
    }
config.update(patch)

which ends up editing ~/.jupyter/nbconfig/notebook.json for you.

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rd11
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  • Trying the second console solution produced the following error for me: `Uncaught TypeError: config.update is not a function; at :8:8;`. Meh. – xtian Feb 20 '17 at 15:19
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    This doesn't change the auto indent length. For example, if I hit enter after typing `for i in range(10) :`, I get 4 spaces instead of 2. – Tom Jan 08 '20 at 13:13