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microsoft / codetour

VS Code extension that allows you to record and play back guided tours of codebases, directly within the editor.
https://aka.ms/codetour
MIT License
4.36k stars 113 forks source link

Export notebook as HTML #54

Closed bestia-dev closed 4 years ago

bestia-dev commented 4 years ago

I like very much the "View Notebook". Is it possible to export that as html or markdown to a local file ? I hope it retains the same graphic style.

image

lostintangent commented 4 years ago

@LucianoBestia This is a great idea! Unfortunately, it would be a pretty significant feature though, since I’m relying heavily on VS Code’s native notebook renderer for this, and I’d have to replicate all of that. I’ll explore some options this week 👍

Out of curiosity: could you share what you had in mind with being able to export it? Sharing it with others that aren’t using VS Code?

bestia-dev commented 4 years ago

A software project can be viewed from many different angles, depends on the persons interaction with it. Every role needs some explanation in a form of a book/tutorial/manual,... For the app user, there must be a user manual or something like this. For the developer they need a reference documentation and a (more or less) explanatory readme.md. Also code comments are essential. But none of these is really adequate for understanding the code flow. It is ok for using the code as a library, but not to engage into understanding and modifying the code. Writing a book for the "code flow" is absolutely a nightmare. The code changes fast, and is impossible to keep all the code fragments in the book in sync with the actual code. So in 5 minutes that book is obsolete and mostly unusable or at least deceiving. Your extension CodeTour makes a breakthrough in this area. Instead of copying static code fragments into a text document, you have the opposite direction: virtually add text to the code. So the code is always in sync. The text don't change so often, really, because the code is a lot self-explanatory. The most important part is the sequence of steps to teach a mental image of the code flow to another person. That sequence does not exist in the code itself. Not on a high level for quick human understanding. Not every developer has VSCode. So a generated static html "book" file looks great to share knowledge with others. I like very much the dark design of the "notebook". The same code is also available on GitHub, so it could be easy to add a link and jump from the notebook to Github code. Thank you. Great job.

bestia-dev commented 4 years ago

Sorry for closing, Wrong button.

I don't really know much about VSCode, but in essence it is a web browser. So I would expect, that what we see on the screen is rendered HTML+css. And maybe there is a method to export that underlying HTML. I don't know. I just wish.

bestia-dev commented 4 years ago

I discuss the same also in issue https://github.com/vsls-contrib/codetour/issues/55. I will close this issue.