Autocompletion of variable names in Jupyter Lab (or Notebook) can be frustratingly inconsistent. For a smoother development experience, the jupyterlab-lsp extension provides better completions using the same language servers as Visual Studio Code.

Note that this is only available in Jupyter Lab 3+, not Jupyter Notebook.

To install it in your conda environement, run:

conda install -c conda-forge 'jupyterlab>=3.0.0,<4.0.0a0' jupyterlab-lsp python-language-server

(or add the packages to your environment.yml file).

Autocompletion

To use regular Tab-completion, start typing in a code cell, hit Tab, and you should get a list of possible completions, including type information and documentation:

To access documentation once the code's been written, you can hover your mouse over a function/class call and hit Ctrl:

Style tips

The extension also offers some features similar to Visual Studio Code or Python IDEs, like highlighting poor style or possible errors in your code (these can be disabled):

(code examples from https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Probability.ipynb)