notedown

To address “hand editing” problem I wrote a little vim plugin that wraps around notedown (https://github.com/aaren/notedown) to edit notebooks on the fly in a markdown format. It’s not perfect, but it goes a long way for quickly editing notebooks “as a whole”: https://github.com/goerz/ipynb_notedown.vim Other than that, I try to put any lengthy code in functions that are in a module alongside the notebook, so that the notebook mostly contains one-line commands to do kick off a calculation or to generate a plot. I also have a shortcut that copies the content of the current browser text field (notebook cell) into MacVim, and pastes it back automatically as soon as I close the editor.

The notebook server have "contents managers" which decide how notebooks get stored. It is perfectly possible to write what you request, and some users have done it: https://github.com/aaren/notedown here without the outputs but it's easy enough to add. The other possibility is to export a notebook as an actual files and folder tree: https://github.com/takluyver/nbexplode so rich object (png, svg... etc) are independently editable. It though can be challenging to have work well because of different filesystems. You can even go further and tell the server to store nothing on disk but in a database, postgres for example :https://github.com/quantopian/pgcontents

I wrote notedown precisely so that I could edit notebooks in my text editor and version control them as plain text. It would be good to be able to transparently edit a .ipynb in a text editor - I've been meaning to wrap notedown in a vim plugin but haven't had time. This still leaves the version control problem though. Note that I recently enabled the reverse (editing markdown in the browser as if it was a notebook), enabled by setting the following in ~/.ipython/profile_default/ipython_notebook_config.py (or similar): c.NotebookApp.contents_manager_class = 'notedown.NotedownContentsManager' This is useful for more interactive work, e.g. iterating on plots, whilst still having everything stored in markdown. See [1] for more info. [1]: https://github.com/aaren/notedown/issues/22

This is amazing. I think ipython notebook is fantastic in all regards. However, I feel there's a bit of an elephant in the room. The main tools I use as a programmer are shell and a text editor. I'm not about to start writing code in a web browser[1]. Is there any hope that there will be a good workflow for somehow editing .ipynb from a text editor or is that antithetical to the design? Could markdown perhaps be used as a primary editing format to target ipynb? Looks like there's at least one project doing that. https://github.com/aaren/notedown And there's the emacs-specific project https://github.com/tkf/emacs-ipython-notebook [1] EDIT: I mean, not right now anyway. I've got a feeling that statement could seem a bit dated later in my life...