jupyter_highlight_selected_word

What it is and what it does

jupyter_highlight_selected_word is a Jupyter notebook extension that automatically highlights all instances of any word you select in the notebook editor. When you click on or select a word, the extension finds and visually marks every occurrence of that word, either within the current cell or across all cells in the notebook, depending on your configuration.

The extension is based on CodeMirror's Match Highlighter addon but extends it to work across multiple cell editors in a notebook. It offers many configuration options—highlight color, scope (single cell or all cells), outline-only highlighting, minimum character thresholds, keyboard shortcuts, and performance tuning for large notebooks. Configuration is managed through the notebook config system and can be adjusted via the jupyter_nbextensions_configurator UI or programmatically.

Use it for:

• Quickly locate all uses of a variable or function name across multiple cells while writing or debugging code.
• Visually track where a specific term or identifier appears throughout a long notebook to understand data flow.
• Configure outline-only highlighting to distinguish the selected word from its matches in the editor.
• Improve readability by limiting highlighting to code cells only, ignoring Markdown or raw cells.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

A Jupyter notebook extension that highlights all instances of a selected word across the notebook, with configurable scope (current cell or all cells) and visual styling options.

No. The package is abandoned—no updates since 2018 and no commits since 2019. While it has low install friction and no dependencies, it is unlikely to work reliably with modern Jupyter versions and will not receive fixes for compatibility issues or bugs. Consider alternatives that are actively maintained.

Install

jupyter-highlight-selected-word on PyPI

pip install jupyter-highlight-selected-word

uv add jupyter-highlight-selected-word

poetry add jupyter-highlight-selected-word

Installing jupyter_highlight_selected_word

Before you install

Low install friction with no runtime dependencies. However, the package is abandoned—last release was 2018-04-07 and last commit 2019-09-30—so it may not work with recent Jupyter versions or receive bug fixes.

License in practice

BSD license is permissive, allowing commercial and private use with minimal restrictions.

Quickstart

pip install jupyter_highlight_selected_word
jupyter nbextension install --py jupyter_highlight_selected_word
jupyter nbextension enable highlight_selected_word/main

Requires Jupyter notebook to be installed; extension must be installed and enabled before use in notebooks.

Verify before relying

• Compatibility with Jupyter versions released after 2019; the package has not been updated in over 6 years.
• Whether the extension works with JupyterLab or only classic Jupyter notebook.
• Current state of the CodeMirror integration it depends on.

Package facts

Evidence: jupyter_highlight_selected_word-0.2.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl

Tags

More Utilities packages