Display variable memory usage in hover tooltips (VS Code Jupyter)

[ShakirKhurshid]

When using VS Code Jupyter notebooks, variables (like large pandas DataFrames, NumPy arrays, or ML models) can consume a lot of memory, but it’s not obvious how much each one uses, which can lead to memory crash

I’d like to request a feature where hovering over a variable shows its memory usage in addition to the current type/shape/value preview. This would make it easier to monitor and manage memory usage during data science and ML workflows.

Why this would help

• Easy and intuitive: No need to write extra code (sys.getsizeof, df.memory_usage, etc.) or install add-ons.
• Useful for data scientists / ML engineers: Large datasets or tensors can take lot of memory, knowing their memory footprint at a glance helps optimize workflows.
• Consistency with other IDEs: Tools like Spyder and RStudio show memory usage in their variable explorers.

Example UX idea

• Hovering over a pandas DataFrame df could show:
  <class 'pandas.DataFrame'>, shape=(1_000_000, 10), memory=80 MB

Related work

• VS Code Variable Explorer currently shows type, shape, and values, but not memory.
• Classic Jupyter has the nbresuse extension for overall kernel memory, but not per-variable usage.

Impact

This feature would make resource management more transparent and help notebook users optimize their memory usage without extra coding.

[ShakirKhurshid]

I’d be interested in trying to work on this feature myself. I’m new to contributing here, so any guidance on where to start in the codebase would be really helpful. Thanks!

[ShakirKhurshid]

Just to add: I often run Jupyter in VS Code through WSL, where available memory is even more limited. Having memory usage visible on hover would be especially helpful in that setup.