Make checkboxes in Markdown cells tickable

[eslksw]

I am sorry if this sounds trivial and nobody actually cares about it – both of which are probably true – but I think it would be an easy-to-implement feature that would make LiveBooks even more practical, since you could keep track of a couple of to do's in "tinkerbooks" (ie., notebooks one uses to experiment and try out new ideas) but also shared LiveBooks used to collab in projects.

[jonatanklosko]

I actually forgot checkboxes are rendered, because I haven't seen any notebooks using those :D Not sure if reliably figuring out the right text edit is that trivial, but PRs exploring this idea are welcome :)

[eslksw]

Yeah, I think 'trivial' was the wrong term, I meant rather something like 'insignificant'. In fact, you're definitely right in saying that the problem is not trivial.

While also accepting non-Markdown-based solutions, there are two ways to implement it:

1. Tweak the Markdown ⇆ HTML rendering
2. Add a dedicated Kino widget (this would be similar to the Checkbox in ipywidgets)

What would in your opinion be preferred by the community?

[jonatanklosko]

We have checkbox in Kino, but we don't persist widgets state (only smart cells), but regardless this feature is not related to code execution. The way I imagine it would work is an event handler on the html element rendered from markdown, and when a checkbox is clicked we need to apply an appropriate edit in the corresponding code editor (which then is automatically sent to the server as a user change).

[josevalim]

It depends on which markdown you are talking about:

• if you are talking about Kino.Markdown, I think it would be hard to make it persistent and change the source

• if you are talking about regular Markdown cells, then it is great for some use cases, but it isn't usually rendered by Livebook Apps and you won't be able to react to it programatically

• If you want a Kino input/widget, then that's doable, but would be unrelated to markdown :)

[jonatanklosko]

Oh yeah, for clarity what I assumed so far is editing the actual Livebook markdown cells. This wouldn't apply to Kino.Markdown, even though it's the same rendering logic, because Kino.Markdown is programmatic.

[eslksw]

OK, thank you, now I have all info I needed, I'll see what I can do :)