Cadabra on Windows 10 (2026) - integrate into Jupyter Notebook

Question

I recently found out that the windows installer (msi) was upgraded!! I tried it on my Windows 10 laptop and it seems to work (via 'cadabra2-gtk.exe').

I also have JupyterLab installed (anaconda3) on windows and I use it for my python coding. Is there a procedure to install a Cadabra kernel into this JupyterLab?

(for my linux machine I followed the instructions here but I think it's not applicable for the windows installer)

Answer 1

In general you're better off using the "new" Jupyter kernel for Cadabra which is built by default. On Linux, this is a lot easier than using the old Xeus-based kernel in a conda setup. I will soon remove that support from the source tree altogether, as conda is more and more problematic and there is nobody maintaining those packages anymore.

On Windows, you really are much much better off by running the jupyter notebook server inside WSL, so you can rely on the Linux packages. Then connect to that via a browser on the Windows side.

Comments

Indeed on my linux machine I got the "new" Jupyter kernel for Cadabra.

I fear that WSL will be too slow and too resource consuming on my laptop. So far I used two separate machines - windows and linux, but my linux one is currently offline :-(

Should I get from your answer that the Cadabra from the windows installer wasn't compiled/built with the option to have "new" Jupyter kernel for JupyterLab on windows?

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I think it is included but it certainly is unsupported; I simply do not have the time to do more work on it.