enhancement-proposals Console-based generic file type viewers

I'm interested in seeing Markdown and ReST native viewers in the console, for teaching purposes. Are there any plans already in motion? Where would I look to find them? I don't even know where I would start in terms of building such a thing, either...

Not particularly urgent, but @fperez suggested I create an issue rather than bugging him on Twitter :)

Dec 22 '15 21:12 ctb

Titus, I am not quite sure I understand what you mean by "Markdown and ReST native viewers in the console". Which console? What type of viewer?

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 1:08 PM, C. Titus Brown [email protected] wrote:

I'm interested in seeing Markdown and ReST native viewers in the console, for teaching purposes. Are there any plans already in motion? Where would I look to find them? I don't even know where I would start in terms of building such a thing, either...

Not particularly urgent, but @fperez https://github.com/fperez suggested I create an issue rather than bugging him on Twitter :)

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/jupyter/enhancement-proposals/issues/9.

Brian E. Granger Associate Professor of Physics and Data Science Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo @ellisonbg on Twitter and GitHub [email protected] and [email protected]

Dec 28 '15 23:12 ellisonbg

I'm assuming you mean at the repl, like this?

Dec 29 '15 00:12 rgbkrk

I clearly lack the vocabulary here ;). So let's see if I can clarify:

In the main jupyter notebook console, as shown below, you can see a list of files.

There are extension-specific actions that occur when you click on each file.

If you click on the pdf file, it downloads it;
if you click on an ipynb file, it opens it in interactive notebook mode;
if you click on a .txt or .rst file, it opens it in an editor;
if you click on the .md file, it tries to open it in an editor (and fails, at least w/my version - notebook 4.06)

the immediate question is, are there any ways to, or plans to, render the .rst or .md files instead of editing them?

what do you call the thing in the picture, which I called the jupyter notebook console?
what do you call the edit-an-ipynb mode - the repl?
for teaching, it would be great to be able to view (render), edit, and/or download each file from the jupyter notebook console, depending on the extension. For example, I might want to do all three of those things with a .ipynb file.

HTH and thanks for taking the time!

Dec 29 '15 15:12 ctb

@ctb Great questions on names of things and suggestion re: teaching. I tried opening an example .md file using the 4.1.0rc1 notebook and it worked with my configuration (though please do check for your use case). screen shot 2015-12-29 at 8 22 28 am I've also filed an issue for a documentation enhancement in the notebook documentation to add a "what's it called" visual for the User interface items. :sunny:

Dec 29 '15 16:12 willingc

On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 08:34:56AM -0800, Carol Willing wrote:

@ctb Great questions on names of things and suggestion re: teaching. I tried opening an example .md file using the 4.1.0rc1 notebook and it worked with my configuration (though please do check for your use case). I'm also filed an issue for a documentation enhancement in the notebook documentation to add a "what's it called" visual for the User interface items. :sunny:

excellent!

any plans to render (in addition to editing) markup files? ...and any guidance on what these things are called?

Dec 29 '15 18:12 ctb

@ctb I will leave the plans re: rendering to @ellisonbg and others to reply.

As for guidance on what things are called, I humbly had to look up some of the specific terms myself. (Happily, one of our talented devs @captainsafia will be creating a graphic for the notebook docs on ReadTheDocs to better articulate this to users). Here's what I found in my searching:

The Notebook UI tour in the Help menu has some interactive names for UI and their function (helpful for students getting started)
Notebook Dashboard is the "thing" with the files ;) link to notebook
Once you click and launch a file, you enter the Notebook UI, which also contains the Editor (same link as above). So your question from above "edit in ipynb mode" would not be 'repl' but 'Notebook's Editor'. For example, 'edit a ipynb file in the Editor of the Notebook UI' or 'edit the ipynb file in the Notebook's Editor'.

HTH and thanks for bringing up these questions. Questions, like these, do help us improve the overall documentation and experience for the next user. :sunny:

Dec 29 '15 19:12 willingc

See, Titus? It's good to talk in complete sentences :)

Re. rendering: it's not in our immediate roadmap, and it requires a fair amount of additional tool integration. You might want to have a look at SageMathCloud, that offers side-by-side editing & rendering of many formats, including LaTeX, Markdown and rST in their environment.

Once our 5.0 plugin-based environment is released in 2016, we envision it will be easier for third-parties to develop and deploy new tools that will provide extra functionality to operate in the JupyterLab environment, and functionality like this could be offered by a third-party.