Using your own editor

While we recommend using the marimo editor, we understand that you may prefer to use your own. marimo provides a --watch flag that watches your notebook file for changes, syncing them to the marimo editor or running application. This lets you edit your notebook using an editor of your choice, like neovim, VSCode, Cursor, or PyCharm, and have the changes automatically reflected in your browser.

Install watchdog for better file watching

For better performance, install watchdog. Without watchdog, marimo resorts to polling.

marimo edit --watch

When you run marimo edit with the --watch flag, the marimo server will open your notebook in the browser and watch the underlying notebook file for changes. When you make changes to the notebook file, they will be streamed to the marimo editor in the browser.

Synced code will not be executed automatically, with cells marked as stale instead. Run all stale cells with the marimo editor's "Run" button, or the runStale hotkey, to see the new outputs.

Cell signature and returns

Don't worry about maintaining the signatures of cells and their return values; marimo will handle this for you.

marimo run --watch

When you run a notebook with the --watch flag, whenever the file watcher detects a change to the notebook file, the application will be refreshed. The browser will trigger a page refresh to ensure your notebook starts from a fresh state.

Watching for changes to other modules

marimo can also watch for changes to Python modules that your notebook imports, letting you edit auxiliary Python files in your own editor as well. Learn how to enable this feature in our Module Autoreloading Guide

Watching for data changes

Note

Support for watching data files and automatically refreshing cells that depend on them is coming soon. Follow along at https://github.com/marimo-team/marimo/issues/3258