How to apply theme to jupyter lab

Question

I tried to apply dark theme by putting a *.css file in the ~/.jupyter/custom/ directory (like here). This changes a theme for a normal jupyter notebook. But no affect on the jupyter lab appearance. I also tried to install a theme using jupyter-theme, but alas, no changes in jupyter lab appearance.

Can someone point me to the how-to guide?

Answer 1

UPDATE 02/03/2018 Now this option is already built in in the settings menu!

Recently this issue was closed on the GitHub, and finally it is possible to edit settings of the jupyter lab. Hurray!

The procedure is described in this pull request.

Just update your jupyter-lab (now it is version 0.27.0) and go to File - Settings, then select Theme tab. And type your theme name in the User Overrides and press the check-mark at the right of the string. I tried several, but only "theme": "JupyterLab Dark" seems to work. Enough for me.

I really appreciate the work the jupyter team is doing. Thank you all!

Answer 2

I bit the bullet, and figured out how to write a full custom theme as an extension.

The process is:

1. Copy the Light theme from jupyterlab/packages to your own repository.
2. Edit the package metadata in package.json and src/index.ts
3. Edit the CSS stylesheets in styles
4. Install the theme using jupyter labextensions install .
   • You may need to manually generate dependencies using node

Here is my theme for future reference - https://github.com/nfultz/jupyterlab-theme-simple-extension

EDIT:

There's now a cookiecutter template to make it easier: https://github.com/jupyterlab/theme-cookiecutter