ptjnb

A JupyterLab extension to convert plaintext files to Jupyter notebooks

Installation

pip install ptjnb

Requirements

• JupyterLab >= 4.0.0

Usage

Right-click menu

Select a .py or .md file in the file browser → right-click → Convert to Notebook submenu → pick a parser.

If a .ipynb with the same base name already exists, a confirmation dialog asks before overwriting.

Auto-convert on startup

Add plainTextNotebookConfig to jupyter_config.json (or JupyterLite's jupyter-lite.json):

{
  "jupyter-config-data": {
    "plainTextNotebookConfig": {
      "rules": [
        { "dir": "percent", "parser": "parsePy" },
        { "dir": "sphinx_gallery", "parser": "parseSphinxGallery" },
        { "dir": "markdown", "parser": "parseClassicMd" },
        { "dir": "myst", "parser": "parseMystMd" }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Each rule watches a directory and converts matching files on JupyterLab startup (skips files that already have a .ipynb sibling).

Supported formats

Parser	Menu label	File type	Format
parsePy	Percent format (.py)	.py	Jupytext percent
parseSphinxGallery	Sphinx Gallery (.py)	.py	Sphinx-Gallery
parseClassicMd	Classic Markdown (.md)	.md	Standard markdown — fenced code blocks become code cells
parseMystMd	MyST Notebook (.md)	.md	MyST-NB {code-cell} directives

Uninstall

pip uninstall ptjnb

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md