Progress bars are missing in my Jupyter environment (PSC)

[hombit]

Bug report

When I use the latest release on the PSC ondemand service, I don't see progress bars in a Jupyter Lab notebook:

I use Python 3.12 with the conda environment

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Please check the following:

• I have described the situation in which the bug arose, including what code was executed, information about my environment, and any applicable data others will need to reproduce the problem.
• I have included available evidence of the unexpected behavior (including error messages, screenshots, and/or plots) as well as a descriprion of what I expected instead.
• If I have a solution in mind, I have provided an explanation and/or pseudocode and/or task list.

[delucchi-cmu]

To use tqdm in a jupyter environment, you need the module ipywidgets. I'm not sure the best way to document this for users, though, as it's only an issue when running within a jupyter notebook. Suggestions?

[hombit]

I was about to say that we may recommend to install ipywidgets in this error message, but its installation completely broke my PSC Jupyter Lab

[hombit]

My Jupyter is fixed now, but ipywidgets didn't really help. Could we have an option to use a "simple" tqdm progress bar? Because a naive code like this works for me:

from tqdm import tqdm

for _ in tqdm(range(100)):
    pass

while from tqdm.auto import tqdm does not.

[delucchi-cmu]

To clarify, are you suggesting/approve of potentially having two flag on the arguments?

progress_bar (bool): should we display any progress bar at all
simple_progress_bar (bool): if we're displaying a progress bar, make it a simple (plain text, non-widgety one).

I also want to cross-reference this issue that motivated using the widget-style progress bar in the first place: astronomy-commons/lsdb#167

[hombit]

progress_bar (bool): should we display any progress bar at all
simple_progress_bar (bool): if we're displaying a progress bar, make it a simple (plain text, non-widgety one).

Is there any way to check if widgets are active and do this choice for user?

I also want to cross-reference this issue that motivated using the widget-style progress bar in the first place: astronomy-commons/lsdb#167

The new progress bar is pretty, I think it was a good change!