Compat with jupyter's new HTML table style (original) (raw)

See also discussion in jupyterlab/jupyterlab#961

With the upcoming notebook 5.0 release and in current jupyterlab, jupyter has a new (much better!) default HTML table styling. The only problem is that it fixes the width of columns hardcoded at 150 px.

IMO this is a problem. Not the default as such, but the fact that you cannot easily change this when you want to see long table content. The result is that when having cells/column names with long content (and sometimes you deliberately create such cells/column names), it is impossible to inspect those data with the default repr.
Only solutions are to inspect specifics such as df.values or df.columns.

Another consequence is that the pd.options.display.max_colwidth option becomes useless.

Possible way forward:

• override the max-width for our html repr's to set it to 'none' (@TomAugspurger shows here that this is possible: New table style truncates columns jupyterlab/jupyterlab#961 (comment))
• if we like the more narrow default, we can always decrease the default for pd.options.display.max_colwidth (currently 50 chars) at the same time. The the default looks similar to jupyter's one, but you have still the ability to adjust it with our options.