[IPython-dev] Notebook filename badness

Brian Granger ellisonbg at gmail.com
Wed Jun 27 17:18:13 EDT 2012


On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 4:17 AM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I agree with this assessment completely.  We have to support the
current model because of this prime usage cases.

> 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.

This is interesting.  There are some problems with this model, but I
think this is worth thinking about.

Brian

> Thanks,
> Thomas
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-- 
Brian E. Granger
Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo
bgranger at calpoly.edu and ellisonbg at gmail.com



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