I’ve been using Jupyter Lab notebooks in some of my recent videos on Learn Data with Mark and I wanted to show cell execution timings so that viewers would have an idea of how long things were taking. I thought I’d need to use a custom timer, but it turns out there’s quite a nice plug-in, which we’ll learn about in this blog post.

The plug-in is called jupyterlab-execute-time and it shows a live view of the time that a cell takes to execute, as well as showing the execution time afterward.

We can install the library directly using pip:

Or Poetry, if that’s your thing:

Alternatively, we can use the extension manager inside Jupyter Lab, which you can launch by typing Cmd + Shift + X on a Mac. Once it pops up, search for jupyterlab-execute-time, as shown below:

And then click on 'Install'.

Regardless of the installation option used, you should then see the plugin under the 'Installed' section:

And here’s a screenshot showing the timings for a few cells in a notebook that I’m currently working on: