Support for editing Plain text files (like Python, MyST and R Markdown-based) as notebooks

[allefeld]

Feature: Notebook Editor, Interactive Window, Python Editor cells

Description

The notebook provides an option 'Convert and save to a Python script', which creates a representation of the notebook as a standard .py script using the 'percent format'. This does not only provide yet another way to interactively work with Python and rich output – the format is also a solution to the long-standing problem that the JSON-format of .ipynb files including embedded binary data (graphics) does not play well with source control systems.

Personally I prefer to work with the standard notebook editor interface, but because of the latter problem with source control I like to have a percent-formatted version in parallel.

My feature request: Have an option, either global, per-workspace, or per-notebook, that whenever an .ipynb file is saved, a percent-formatted version of it is created/updated in the background, too. This way the notebook proper can be used for interactive work, but the commits on the percent-formatted version can serve as a readable record of what was done, so if it is necessary to revert changes, it is clear which commit is the right one.

Microsoft Data Science for VS Code Engineering Team: @rchiodo, @IanMatthewHuff, @DavidKutu, @DonJayamanne, @greazer, @joyceerhl

[joyceerhl]

Thanks for the feature request! We'll discuss it at our upcoming triage.

[amittleider]

Definitely agree with this. Now that we have the real jupyter feel directly inside of VSCode, we don't even need to open a browser anymore. The problem is that when VSCode reads percent scripts, the look and feel of the interactive mode is different (and worse) than the new functionality.

We use percent scripts in the repo and open them using Jupyter with Jupytext. Jupytext links the percent script with the ipynb file, just as @allefeld is explaining. It'd be perfect to have this functionality right inside the editor.

[kaaloo]

We were just discussing this issue at work. Would love to see a solution directly in vscode!

[echaya]

Looking forward to this feature. Once released, I'll persuade the whole team to move from JLab to VSCode :D

[ssiegel95]

I would love to have this too. In fact, even having a scriptable means of converting from a "percent formatted" (PF) .py file back to a .ipynb would go a long way towards streamlining many of my team's workflows where we like to keep the PF versions for our automated tests and joint development via git but then export to .ipynb for our forward facing documentation pages.

Thanks for the amazing developer tools that you guys put out there, by the way!

[Aonnghus]

Any news on this issue ? That would really be a great addition to vscode !

[rchiodo]

Sorry but this is not currently on our backlog. We're working on publishing our backlog so that people can see our plans.

It's not that difficult though. You'd just have to watch save requests for the notebook documents (well in insiders anyway) and then run nbconvert every time a save occurred.

If anybody wants to submit a PR we gladly accept them.

[venaturum]

@rchiodo

It's not that difficult though. You'd just have to watch save requests for the notebook documents (well in insiders anyway) and then run nbconvert every time a save occurred.

Hi Rich, how can we watch save requests? I've tried several "run on save" extensions and none of them seem to work on ipynb files for some reason.

[rchiodo]

I believe you could listen to this event:

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/27b2434631bc9e253c30f3d55b837fea41a7c170/src/vs/vscode.proposed.d.ts#L1209

Then after the event fires, run nbconvert on the notebook.