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jupyter / notebook

Jupyter Interactive Notebook
https://jupyter-notebook.readthedocs.io/
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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[Feature Request] Provide a way to navigate to a cell by its index #2817

Open wstomv opened 7 years ago

wstomv commented 7 years ago

The utility nbshow (part of nbdime) will show low-level content details of Jupyter/IPython notebooks. Cells are shown with their index (starting from 0). When hunting down and fixing low-level problems in notebooks, it would be convenient to have ---in the Jupyter Notebook Editor--- a way of navigating to a cell with a given index.

When there are code cells, and these code cells have been executed, you can use the execution_count (In[#] and Out[#]) as a navigation aid. But this is still an awkward substitute for direct navigation based on cell index.

dsblank commented 7 years ago

It would also be handy to expose the cell index in the GUI (perhaps via a mouse over). I have mentioned before that it is difficult to refer to cells in classroom discussions (for example, before execution, there is no identifier). And, since cell execution numbers change with execution (and re-execution), using those as references can be confusing. Making the cell index more obvious is not completely immune of such issues (ordering can change) but for referencing, cell index is more stable.