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So let's say I am progressing inside a jupyter notebook top to bottom. I run code blocks, then some markdown, then code blocks, and so on. At some point I need

So let's say I am progressing inside a jupyter notebook top to bottom. I run code blocks, then some markdown, then code blocks, and so on. At some point I need to drop down to the terminal to run something. I run commands in the terminal I collect some results or collect some info and go back to my notebook to resume my work inside it. Later I need to look up something in a text file. I open a certain text file. Browse to a certain line number, read that line, maybe edit the text file, and close the text file to go back to my notebook. Does JupyterLab keep a record of the point in my progress in the notebook when I switched to the terminal or the text file, what I ran in the terminal, and what info was used? If I edited the text file, what was before and after of the text file? In other words, does JupyterLab help with the chronology of workflow events? If not, I don't see how this is anything other than hundreds of "IDE"s out there. Notebook format has its own issues, but going back to IDE is not a solution. Offering both notebook and an IDE at the same time and leaving it up to the user to make the best of the combo is not a solution either, unless the offering helps some kind of a way of eliminating the cons of either format.

rsfern 9y ago
Jupyter doesn’t track the execution history of your cells like this. However, you can run the shell commands straight from a notebook cell (use the %%bash cell magic or prepend the line with !). Not sure what to do about editing data files. If you can do this with something like awk, just use a shell magic cell, but if it needs to be done manually I guess you’re stuck manually documenting this in markdown?
fizixer 9y ago
Replying to my own comment, I have a plot and a text file open side by side. I want to change a value in the text file and I want the plot to be updated automatically. The update might not be trivial, behind the scenes maybe the text file is an input to a simulation that runs for a minute, then computes some values in a table that are used for the plot. Can Jupyter allow you to do that? Point being, offering an IDE in 2018 is not interesting unless you added something "smart" to the IDE that makes the life of the engineer/scientist easier compared to the rest. Otherwise, IDE's are being developed for the last three decades or more.
- wenc 9y ago
  With respect to your parent comment: the IDE can be made to log UI context switches, but it cannot interpret intention. This is a very unusual and I suspect very sub-optimal thing for an IDE to support, whatever year it is supposed to have been built. If you really want those events to be recorded, you need to either annotate your code, or programatically have it invoke something. As for graphics updating on file-change event, that can probably be supported through an extension. This is similar to how certain LaTeX editors automatically re-render the doc on a change-event.

rsfern 9y ago

Jupyter doesn’t track the execution history of your cells like this. However, you can run the shell commands straight from a notebook cell (use the %%bash cell magic or prepend the line with !). Not sure what to do about editing data files. If you can do this with something like awk, just use a shell magic cell, but if it needs to be done manually I guess you’re stuck manually documenting this in markdown?

fizixer 9y ago

Replying to my own comment, I have a plot and a text file open side by side. I want to change a value in the text file and I want the plot to be updated automatically. The update might not be trivial, behind the scenes maybe the text file is an input to a simulation that runs for a minute, then computes some values in a table that are used for the plot. Can Jupyter allow you to do that? Point being, offering an IDE in 2018 is not interesting unless you added something "smart" to the IDE that makes the life of the engineer/scientist easier compared to the rest. Otherwise, IDE's are being developed for the last three decades or more.

wenc 9y ago
With respect to your parent comment: the IDE can be made to log UI context switches, but it cannot interpret intention. This is a very unusual and I suspect very sub-optimal thing for an IDE to support, whatever year it is supposed to have been built. If you really want those events to be recorded, you need to either annotate your code, or programatically have it invoke something. As for graphics updating on file-change event, that can probably be supported through an extension. This is similar to how certain LaTeX editors automatically re-render the doc on a change-event.