[IPython-dev] Notebook filename badness

[Thomas Kluyver]

On 27 June 2012 02:10, Brian Granger <ellisonbg at gmail.com> wrote:
> What I am proposing would *improve* local use dramatically:
>
> * Persistent URLs that you can bookmark and reload across sessions.
> * No more worrying about accidentally renaming/uploading over an
> existing notebook.
> * A natural place for autosave files.

But as a local application, I expect it to work with regular files in
normal locations on my filesystem. Our intention was 'directory as
project' - you can have your notebook files alongside data files and
Python modules. Eventually, I'd like to be able to double click the
ipynb files in my file manager to load them, rather than having to
load up our 'notebook list' as a file manager.

This approach has lots of advantages that I don't think we want to
throw away. You can easily put a project in version control, or keep
it in Dropbox or similar services. You can quickly grab the file and
attach it to an email. You can easily back up the project folder.
Notebooks tucked away in a separate folder and named by meaningless
UUIDs would be much less convenient in many ways.

Perhaps I can suggest an alternative approach: in 'local application'
mode, we don't try to offer a notebook manager. It's never going to be
as good as native file managers, and we're not really interested in
reimplementing that functionality. If you want to copy notebooks,
delete them, etc., you do it in your file manager (or terminal, if you
prefer). It would still need to detect conflicts when you 'save as'
from the notebook interface, but I'm sure we can make that work.

Thanks,
Thomas