afairley
commented
6 months ago It does basically work they way I want for present purposes if you use the %shell magic to clone the repository and then use the file browser, but the documentation here suggests, at least to me, that this is the kind of functionality that the repository browse feature is going to provide out of the box without me having to additionally clone the repository that I already selected to "browse".
Describe the current behavior It would appear that rather than their being an interface for browsing code in github repositories inside of the Colab wrapper around Jupyter there is only a browser for finding and opening notebooks within repositories. Describe the expected behavior Documentation at
https://colab.research.google.com/github/googlecolab/colabtools/blob/main/notebooks/colab-github-demo.ipynb
makes it sound like colab supports opening up an entire github repository and browsing around to read the code conveniently. There are four different options there, although they all seem to boil down to the same thing ultimately which is something like
What this is a browser to let you look for notebooks inside of a github repository and open those , not a browser for github repositories to let you open up the repository and use colab as an IDE to read the code efficiently and quickly.
Probably this is just an issue with the documentation not being clear enough about what is meant by "browsing" a repository, but it is entirely possible that there was more functionality there before that got hidden somehow by a UI update , but it seems likely to me on thorough examination now that it is just ambiguous documentation leading me to believe a feature is there that I(and probably a few others) would really like . Looking at
https://colab.research.google.com/github/googlecolab/colabtools/blob/main
it'd appear that this is just a notebook finder. Does it crawl the repository and find all *.ipynb files or just look for a notebooks directory? Billing this feature as a notebook finder and not a repository browser at https://colab.research.google.com/github/googlecolab/colabtools/blob/main/notebooks/colab-github-demo.ipynb#scrollTo=WzIRIt9d2huC would be more directly communicative What web browser you are using Thankfully this isn't a browser dependent issue. I'm using chrome.