[IPython-dev] Please read: IPython Notebook UI goes modal

Brian Granger ellisonbg at gmail.com
Sat Jan 11 16:58:57 EST 2014


> There are a couple of comments/remarks that I would like to make.

Thanks for the feedback!

> 1. Interrupting/restarting the kernel doesn't require modifiers. I
> understand that there is a pop-up window asking for confirmation, but
> wouldn't it be better to have Cntr+. and Cntr+i for this action, and then
> skip the pop-up window?

More on that in another reply.

> 2. In the example notebook, Cntr+/ is not listed as a shortcut for
> commenting out lines, but it is still available. That won't be removed, will
> that?

Yep it still works. The difficulty is that is a code-mirror shortcut
and those are not shown in the Keyboard Shortcut help or managed by
us.

> 3. Selecting the previous/next cell has now two shortcuts, up/down and j/k.
> About a year ago, we had a discussion about navigation in the kernel
> history, and the problem that time was that we couldn't find two keyboard
> keys that would work on all OSs. (Here is the link:
> https://github.com/ipython/ipython/pull/2203) Since the modal structure
> effective increases the number of available keys, I was wondering, whether
> it would make sense to return this question now. One could then assign j/k
> to history navigation, and the up/down arrows could navigate in the
> notebook. I can look into the implementation, if that's OK.

A few points on this:

* We absolutely need to keep the up and down arrows working for select
next/prev. Users not trained on j/k - most of our users that is - will
intuitively use the arrow keys. If those don't work, we will get much
frustration aimed in our direction.
* The reason we added j/k as a second pair of next/prev shortcuts is
that they are much more efficient to type and our advanced users (vim,
gmail, etc.) are already used to them.

I am -1 on changing these, but there are now a whole lot of other
keyboard shortcuts free that could be used for history navigation.
Also, everything is customizable now.

Cheers,

Brian

> Cheers,
> Zoltán
>
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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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