Pluto.jl & PlutoUI Tutorial

One of the most common tools used by most Data Scientists when doing a project is a Jupyter Notebook – which can be used primarily with Julia (the Ju in JUpyter) Python (the Pyt In JuPYTer) and R (the R in the JupyteR). It quite useful and has a large community.

Let us see another alternative to Jupyter Notebook primarily for Julia – Pluto Notebooks.

Pluto Notebooks is a reactive form of notebook that is lightweight, simple and easy to use.

As a reactive form of notebook it means that when you change a variable or a function Pluto automatically updates all affected cells, which is quite fascinating.

Let us see how to work with Pluto Notebooks

Installation

To install Pluto.jl you can use the Pkg Mode “]” from the REPL or using the Pkg Module.

(@v1.5) pkg> add Pluto
Updating registry at ~/.julia/registries/General
Updating git-repo https://github.com/JuliaRegistries/General.git
Resolving package versions…

using Pkg
Pkg.add("Pluto")

To Start Your Pluto Notebook you can import and run Pluto which serve your Pluto Notebook Instance on a localhost.

import Pluto
Pluto.run()

Working with PlutoUI

Just like Jupyter Notebook there are several widgets we can use such as ipython widget (ipwidgets) or panel etc, we can use widgets in Pluto Notebook.

To be able to use widgets in Pluto Notebook, you will need to add PlutoUI.jl to your Julia Box. After installing you can start via

using PlutoUI

With PlutoUI, you can use several widgets such as text input widgets, buttons,sliders,select and multiselect as well as file picker and more.

To view all the various widget you can use the varinfo() function (similar to dir() in python) .

varinfo(PlutoUI)

name	size	summary
Button	184 bytes	DataType
CheckBox	184 bytes	DataType
Clock	200 bytes	DataType
ColorStringPicker	184 bytes	DataType
DateField	200 bytes	DataType
DownloadButton	192 bytes	DataType
Dump	0 bytes	typeof(PlutoUI.Dump)
FilePicker	184 bytes	DataType
LocalResource	0 bytes	typeof(PlutoUI.LocalResource)
MultiSelect	208 bytes	DataType
NumberField	232 bytes	DataType
PasswordField	184 bytes	DataType
PlutoUI	170.327 KiB	Module
Print	0 bytes	typeof(PlutoUI.Print)
Radio	208 bytes	DataType
RangeSlider	248 bytes	DataType
RemoteResource	296 bytes	DataType
Resource	296 bytes	DataType
Select	208 bytes	DataType
Show	232 bytes	DataType
Slider	240 bytes	DataType
TextField	208 bytes	DataType
TimeField	200 bytes	DataType
WithIOContext	192 bytes	DataType
as_html	0 bytes	PlutoUI.var”#54#55″{MIME{Symbol(“text/html”)}}
as_mime	0 bytes	typeof(PlutoUI.as_mime)
as_png	0 bytes	PlutoUI.var”#54#55″{MIME{Symbol(“image/png”)}}
as_svg	0 bytes	PlutoUI.var”#54#55″{MIME{Symbol(“image/svg+xml”)}}
as_text	0 bytes	PlutoUI.var”#54#55″{MIME{Symbol(“text/plain”)}}
with_terminal	0 bytes	typeof(PlutoUI.with_terminal)

Using the widget is quite easy and you can even use the @bind macro to bind the widget to a variable in order to store the result or value and use in another place.

#  Text Input bond to the variable 'fname'
@bind fname TextField()

You can check the video tutorials below

Displaying Results In Pluto Notebooks

One surprising thing about Pluto Notebooks for now (as of November 2020) is that using print,println or show or display doesn’t render the result in the pluto notebook cells but rather in the terminal as stdout.

In order to see your result in the cell you can use the PlutoUI with_terminal() widget or the Print() function to enable you to see your result

Let us explore these methods

Method 1:

# Method 1: Using PlutoUI: with_terminal()
with_terminal() do
    x = "Hello Julia From Terminal";
    println(x)
end
# Or 
with_terminal(println,x)

# Method 2: PlutoUI: Print()

Hopefully in the future versions of Pluto we will be able to get this feature.

Thanks For Your Time

Jesus Saves

Jesse E.Agbe(JCharis)