IPython Notebook Navigator

This is a standalone navigation enhancement for the IPython (>1.0) HTML Notebook.

Screenshot

Features

• Thumbnails of input/output cells, scaled to their relative size in the notebook
• Click-to-scroll

Roadmap

• Instant search of cells with highlight
• Visual indication of cell execution

Browser Support and Limitations

• Firefox (latest): good!
• Chrome (latest): okay...
  • Offscreen elements aren't snapshotted correctly
• Safari 5: okay...
  • Same as Chrome
• IE: haven't checked

Motivation

I had been kicking this idea around for a while, and had done some execution previously, but the state of JavaScript enhancement to the Notebook was still an issue under discussion.

At this point, it seems like a commitment has been made to require.js, which at least handles multi-file dependencies within a plugin, but still doesn't prevent every other UI enhancement from, for example, bringing in d3.

Installation

You basically need to:

• drop the files from this repository in your <profile>static/custom folder
• in that folder, create a custom.js
• to that file, add a call to require to the IPython Notebook Navigator .js file

Since we can safely assume you are using the IPython Notebook, here's a quick way to install it via the Notebook:

import os
import IPython
from urllib import urlretrieve
from zipfile import ZipFile

version = "0.0.0"
app_name = "ipython-notebook-navigator"
nav_url = "https://codeload.github.com/bollwyvl/%s/zip/v%s" % (app_name, version)
unzip_name = "%s-%s" % (app_name, version)

profile = IPython.utils.path.locate_profile()
custom = os.path.join(profile, "static", "custom")
ipynbnav = os.path.join(custom, "ipython-notebook-navigator")

if not os.path.exists(custom):
    os.makedirs(custom)

with open(os.path.join(custom, "custom.js"), "a+") as custom_js:
    custom_js.write('''
require(["custom/ipython-notebook-navigator/ipynbnav"], function(ipynbnav){
  ipynbnav.init();
});
''')

zip_path, success = urlretrieve(nav_url, os.path.join(custom, "nav.zip"))

with ZipFile(zip_path, "r") as nav_zip:
    nav_zip.extractall(custom)

os.rename(os.path.join(custom, unzip_name), ipynbnav)

os.unlink(zip_path)

License

This script is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License.

For ease of installation, until IPython has a reasonable JavaScript package manager, the following libraries are distributed along with this code.

• d3 is licensed under the BSD License
• html2canvas is licensed under the MIT License