How to change the background color of a single cell in a jupyterlab (jupyter notebook)?1

The following is a bit of a hack, but it works to set the color of a coding cell. We will define our primary function and place it at the top of our notebook.

from IPython.display import HTML, display

def set_background(color):    
    script = (
        "var cell = this.closest('.jp-CodeCell');"
        "var editor = cell.querySelector('.jp-Editor');"
        "editor.style.background='{}';"
        "this.parentNode.removeChild(this)"
    ).format(color)

    display(HTML('<img src onerror="{}">'.format(script)))

To use it we add the following line in the top of the coding cell: set_background('honeydew')

To use it as cell magic, we can do:

from IPython.core.magic import register_cell_magic

@register_cell_magic
def background(color, cell):
    set_background(color)

… and to use it, we add the following line in the top of the coding cell: %%background honeydew

jupyterlb


This test is done in jupyterlab version 1.1.4 on a MacBook Pro running macOS Catalina.

Footnotes:

  1. stackoverflow ↩