Notebooks - Git/PR Suggestions for Improvement

[claudiaregio]

1. Toggle to hide unchanged cells

When working with really long notebooks, opening a diff view can require quite a bit of scrolling to get to the changed cells. By opening a diff view, the user has effectively already signaled they're interested in changes not things that have stayed the same. In order to help fast track that priority, it would be nice if there was an option to hide unchanged cells.

Potential Idea: Add entry item here "Show Unchanged Cells"

2. Line numbers for diff view

Diff views are often used for peers to review their code. Since our current diff view does not include an execution count or line numbers, if two coworkers are discussing changes in a notebook it can be difficult to index what piece of code/output they'd like to review.

3. Bypass merge conflicts and show valid notebook

Today, notebooks that have merge conflicts become completely broken. Since this is supported functionality in Jupyter Notebook's nbdime, it would be good to make sure that users can still open and render notebooks with merge conflicts.

#136133

4. Introduce UI for comparisons/resolving of merge conflicts

Today, if a user runs into a merge conflict with notebooks, there is no UI to resolve the problem. They need to open the base (common parent notebook), the local (changes to the base) and remote (other changes to the base) and compare them manually. Due to the bug in # 3, users have to open the local and remote notebooks as text files and manually try to understand what the differences are. This causes users to fall into the same difficulty with parsing notebook diffs that led us to develop the custom notebook diffing experience to begin with.

Would be incredibly helpful if there was a UI that would not allow users to compare and effectively resolve merge conflicts.

5. Support exclusion of outputs from git commits

When working with notebooks, outputs are not always desired when versioning notebooks. Supporting the ability to clear outputs, save, and stage/commit a notebook in one action would reduce some friction for users attempting to purely version control the code.

Related:
#131944
microsoft/vscode-jupyter#4670

6. Revert input/output together in diff view

Today, when in a diff view there are two different icons for reverting inputs and reverting outputs. If a user reverts just the output or just the input they effectively have a mismatched input/output combination. Allowing the reverting both of these as a pair could solve this issue so users don't have to click twice per change to maintain a "correct" document.

7. Show input/output in diff view only by default

During our diffing QP, we found that Jupyter users did not expect metadata differences to be displayed by default in a diff view. Since the overflow menu for settings is not very discoverable, it would make sense to have the default not show metadata.

Related:
#120376
microsoft/vscode-jupyter#5356
#112513

[vscodenpa]

This feature request is now a candidate for our backlog. The community has 60 days to upvote the issue. If it receives 20 upvotes we will move it to our backlog. If not, we will close it. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!

[yohfdo]

Can we have some support for this and include this?

[DonJayamanne]

1. Toggle to hide unchanged cells
   Resolved here
   Duplicate of Notebook diff - minimap or hide unchanged cells #174152

2. line numbers
   Line numbers for notebook diff view #226694

3. Bypass merge conflicts and show valid notebook
   Native Notebooks - Git Merge Conflicts Breaks Notebooks  #136133

Fixed.

4. Introduce UI for comparisons/resolving of merge conflicts
   Duplicate of Cannot solve merge conflict for cell code with notebook (ipynb) in VSCODE #206279

5. Support exclusion of outputs from git commits

Not planned

6. Revert input/output together in diff view

Not planned

7. Show input/output in diff view only by default

Not planned.

[DonJayamanne]

Duplicate of