Table of Contents

1. Getting started
2. Features
   1. Context aware cell editing in Emacs
   2. Keyboard based notebook interactions
      1. Keybindings

A next browser mode for editing Jupyter Notebooks.

NOTE: This is largely a WIP, with features added on the fly as I find myself wanting them during my day to day work.

For more information on next-browser, see:

• https://github.com/next-browser/next
• https://github.com/atlas-engineer/next/blob/master/documents/MANUAL.org

Getting started

I'm not sure if there's a prescribed mechanism for adding user packages to next, but I think you should be able to just (load "/path/to/jupyter-nb-mode.lisp") somewhere in your init.lisp. Then, navigate to the URL of a running notebook server in next, open a .ipynb file, and then call M-x jupyter-nb-mode from the notebook's buffer.

Features

Context aware cell editing in Emacs

The command edit-cell will open the selected cell's contents in a new Emacs buffer. The cell contents are transfered between Next and Emacs by means of a temporary file, whose extension is chosen based on the selected cell's type. code cells are assigned .py extensions, markdown cells .md, and raw cells .txt. Thus, when the cell's contents are opened in Emacs, the associated buffer should already be setup with the correct mode(s) for editing that sort of text.

Similarly, you can edit the selected cell's metadata with the command edit-cell-metadata, which will spawn a .JSON temp file.

Editing environments based on a package like python-mode or elpy will be completely unaware of what's going on in the notebook kernel's namespace, so the linter will probably complain about references that weren't imported or defined in the active cell. One possible solution to this that I'd like to try (and which I think could potentially be really slick), is to setup jupyter-mode as the .py editing environment in Emacs, and then configure it to hook into the active notebook's kernel.

Keyboard based notebook interactions

There's a lot of work to be done on this front, but at the moment you can bind the commands select-next-cell and select-prev-cell. Execution can be done through execute-selected-cells and execute-all-cells. There are a bunch of other commands for navigation, cell-insertion, copying, pasting, saving, etc… I basically add these as I find myself wishing they existed.

Keybindings

As an Evil user whose never spent a significant amount of time around the vanilla Emacs keybindings, I've really only defined a vi-map for this (there's an emacs-map but it's pretty sparse). If anybody out there is actually using this, suggestions for sensible non-evil Emacs users are appreciated.

NOTE: In the vi-map, I have bound o and O to insert a cell below/above the currently selected cell (resp.), which overrides the default root-mode bindings for set-url-current-buffer and set-url-new-buffer.