IDL and ENVI Notebooks
One of the coolest features of Visual Studio code is that it natively supports notebooks.
If you are new to notebooks, they are:
Easy for doing ad-hoc programming
A great way to organize your logic and thought process intermixed with code blocks and results
A way that you can share code with your colleagues and friends
Here's a short video introducing IDL Notebooks (requires internet access). You can also find the video here on our website.
Pro Tip
With the latest release of VSCode, you can now pop open notebooks in separate windows.
All notebooks share the same instance of IDL behind the scenes, so you can only run one at a time with the current implementation.
If you are interested in being able to run more than one notebook at a time, let us know on GitHub and we can take a look!
IDL and ENVI Requirements
Notebooks have specific version requirements for IDL and ENVI:
For IDL, you'll need IDL 8.8.0 or newer (enforced, and checked, when notebooks start)
For ENVI, you'll need ENVI 6.0 or ENVI 5.7. Any other version of ENVI is not guaranteed to work.
Getting Started with Notebooks
The easiest way to get started with IDL or ENVI Notebooks is through VSCode, which includes several example notebooks.
Here's how:
Navigate to the IDL sidebar within VSCode
Find the "Notebooks" section
Select "Open IDL Notebook Example" or "Open ENVI Notebook Example" to open a new notebook that you can play around with.
In-Depth Tutorial
Here's a longer video talking more about how to use IDL Notebooks and it covers some of the more advanced ENVI APIs to display imagery and other types of data (requires internet access). You can also find the video here on our website.
Resetting Notebook Examples
If you want to reset the example notebooks to their defaults, you can:
Open the command palette within VSCode
Search for "IDL: Reset IDL and ENVI Notebook Examples"