I've been frustrated by huge Jupyter notebooks bloated with Base64-encoded images, making them sluggish in VSCode and causing frequent connection drops when working remotely.
To fix this, I created "dietnb", a tiny Python library that automatically saves plots as external image files instead of embedding them as Base64. Images then appear neatly as Markdown-linked images (`![]()`), drastically shrinking notebook size.
Currently supports VSCode and standard Jupyter environments (Colab support appears tricky).
Quick start:
pip install dietnb
dietnb install
Then simply plot anything as usual!
Smaller notebooks should also help workflows using AI or diff tools.
GitHub → <https://github.com/JinLover/dietnb>
Feedback and suggestions are welcome!