Users should be able to clone a notebook

[khinsen]

It is rather cumbersome at the moment to create a new notebook whose contents are initialized to those of an existing notebook. Users may be tempted to just copy to the ipynb file, but this rapidly creates a mess because the name of a notebook is stored in the notebook itself and thus needs to be changed in the copy.

It would be nice to have a "Clone" operation in the "Actions" panel, next to "New".

[ellisonbg]

We should definitely support this. I will add it to my list of todos.

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 6:40 AM, khinsen
reply@reply.github.com
wrote:

It is rather cumbersome at the moment to create a new notebook whose contents are initialized to those of an existing notebook. Users may be tempted to just copy to the ipynb file, but this rapidly creates a mess because the name of a notebook is stored in the notebook itself and thus needs to be changed in the copy.

It would be nice to have a "Clone" operation in the "Actions" panel, next to "New".

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#781

Brian E. Granger
Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo
bgranger@calpoly.edu and ellisonbg@gmail.com

[fperez]

Thanks, @ellisonbg, it's indeed a very valid request. Thanks for the feedback, Konrad! Glad to see you on github :)

[aarchiba]

Once this works it might make sense to have a list of "templates" that area always visible - I always use the same preamble, importing numpy, scipy, and matplotlib, and switching to svg mode.

[fperez]

@aarchiba, note that you can configure your mpl inline backend to always use the svg backend, and if you start the notebook with --pylab inline, you don't need to import numpy as np nor pyplot as plt explicitly, as they are done for you. This will let you have in your #1 cell just the imports specific to the actual problem you're working on.

You can drop this:

c = get_config()
c.IPKernelApp.exec_lines = [
"from IPython.zmq.pylab import backend_inline",
"cfg = backend_inline.InlineBackendConfig.instance()",
"cfg.figure_format = 'svg'"
]

into a file named ipython_notebook_config.py in your ~/.ipython/profile_default directory, and that will do the trick. That, and an alias like

alias ipnb='ipython notebook --pylab=inline'

should take care of this part of the boilerplate.

Not that your suggestion isn't valid in general, just providing an immediate solution for part of it.

[fperez]

Note: the above can be written more cleanly with a regular multiline string:

c = get_config()
c.IPKernelApp.exec_lines = ["""
from IPython.zmq.pylab import backend_inline
cfg = backend_inline.InlineBackendConfig.instance()
cfg.figure_format = 'svg'
"""
]

[fperez]

And just for the sake of completeness, as pointed out in #735, you can just do

c.InlineBackendConfig.figure_format = 'svg'

[aarchiba]

The problem with all of these is that I want my exported notebooks to be standalone - so that people can just grab the python code and run it in a plain interpreter, or in an ipython notebook of their own. If I move all sorts of setup into my config files, it lurks as a surprise for people trying to use my notebooks...

SVG mode is obviously an exception, but it also seems like something there should be UI for...

[fperez]

Yup, we've been talking about this already quite a bit in #892. I just opened it as #903 so we don't let it slip by. Needless to say, pull requests will be warmly received :)

[ellisonbg]

This is fixed in master