Figure Explorer

Figure Explorer is a VS Code extension for browsing and navigating figures generated in Jupyter notebooks.

When working with notebooks containing many plots, it can be difficult to keep track of which cell produced which figure. Figure Explorer collects figures from your open notebooks and provides a dedicated gallery for quickly browsing them and jumping back to their source cells.

Features

• Automatically discovers PNG figures generated by open Jupyter notebooks.
• Synchronizes with notebook changes as cells are edited or outputs are regenerated.
• Organizes figures by notebook.
• Browse figures in a dedicated thumbnail gallery.
• Lazy-loads thumbnails so large collections of figures remain responsive.
• Displays a larger preview of the selected figure.
• Search figures by title, notebook, cell number, or code.
• Filter figures by titled/untitled status.
• Browse figures from the current notebook or all open notebooks.
• Jump directly from a figure to the notebook cell that generated it.
• Save figures as PNG files.
• Export figures as PDF files.

Gallery

The Gallery view provides a thumbnail overview of the figures in your notebook. Selecting a figure displays a larger preview along with information about its source cell.

Figure Titles

You can optionally give a figure a title by adding a # figure: comment as the first non-empty line of a notebook cell:

# figure: Residual distribution

plt.hist(residuals)
plt.xlabel("Residual")
plt.ylabel("Count")
plt.show()

The title will be displayed throughout Figure Explorer and can be used when searching for figures.

Cells without a figure title are automatically assigned a number such as Figure 1, Figure 2, etc.

Search

The Gallery includes several search modes:

cell:12

Find the figure generated by cell 12.

figure:5

Find figure 5.

title:residual

Search figure titles.

code:plt.scatter

Search the source code associated with figures.

You can also enter a general search term to search through the figure's notebook, title, and source code.

Getting Started

1. Install Figure Explorer from the VS Code Marketplace.
2. Open a Jupyter notebook in VS Code.
3. Run cells that generate figures.
4. Open the Figure Explorer activity-bar view.
5. Browse your figures in the Gallery.

Figure Explorer updates as notebook outputs change, so you can continue working in the notebook without manually rescanning it.

Requirements

• VS Code 1.125.0 or later
• Jupyter notebooks (.ipynb)

Current Limitations

Figure Explorer currently focuses on PNG image outputs generated by Jupyter notebooks.

The extension is currently in early development. Features and behavior may change as it is tested with different notebooks and workflows.

Feedback

Figure Explorer is being developed with scientific and data-analysis workflows in mind. Feedback, bug reports, and suggestions are welcome.

If you encounter a problem, please include:

• VS Code version
• Figure Explorer version
• Operating system
• A description of the notebook/output that caused the problem
• Any relevant error message from VS Code

License

License information will be added in a future release.