On the "Save to file" modal for unsaved notebooks, suggest a file name based on the notebook's origins or title

[postpostscript]

Hi! Thanks for creating this great tool!

I would like a way to quickly save unsaved notebooks in a way where I don't have to think about naming them. I have a simple solution working

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My solution:

On a notebook's "Save to file" modal, if a file has not been selected previously, display the suggested file with a "Select" button:

If you click "Select", the file will be selected:

If you click it while the file picker is open, the input will be updated:

Methods to derive the suggested path:

• Imported by URL: https://example.com/example/example.livemd -> $LIVEBOOK_HOME/example.livemd (could be $LIVEBOOK_HOME/example.com/example/example.livemd?)
• Imported by file: $LIVEBOOK_HOME/[uploaded filename]
• For all others, derive from the notebook title:
  • # My notebook -> $LIVEBOOK_HOME/My_notebook.livemd
  • # notebook.livemd -> $LIVEBOOK_HOME/notebook.livemd
  • # my/notebook.md -> $LIVEBOOK_HOME/my_notebook.md.livemd

The file path is sanitized, and .livemd is added if it has a different extension. If that file exists already, it will try -1.livemd, -2.livemd, etc. until one doesn't

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Is this something that would make sense for me to polish for this repo? If so, do you have any feedback on my solution? Thanks!

[josevalim]

This looks great. I think for simplicity we should go with:

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Methods to derive the suggested path:

Imported by URL: https://example.com/example/example.livemd -> $LIVEBOOK_HOME/example.livemd
For all others, derive from the notebook title:
    # My notebook -> $LIVEBOOK_HOME/my-notebook.livemd

I.e. lowercase, replace spaces with "-"

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WDYT?

[jonatanklosko]

We actually never have unsaved notebooks. We autosave all notebooks into the autosave directory, and those are named based on the title. So when the user wants to explicitly save a notebook, I honestly think it's better if they choose the name explicitly.

Also, prefilling the name would make it harder for the user to select a different directory. I very much like the current flow where I can start typing the directory name, then hit Tab and Enter, and once in the right place just type the name.

Sidenote: we should definitely not do this if the notebook title is "Untitled notebook". That's one of the major pain points with Jupyter that it automatically creates notebooks like Untitled.ipynb, Untitled1.ipynb, which seems fine in the short term, but after a while users have no idea what the files are.

[postpostscript]

I see what you mean about making it easy to select a different directory. What do you think of these changes here?:

When you click the select button, instead open the file selector with the filename highlighted (this filename highlighting could also be nice to have in general):

If you change the directory in the file selector, update the suggested file to use that directory:

[jonatanklosko]

I think a separate options for "Select suggested" and "Choose file" are too much, and the directory behaviour of "Select suggested" diverges too much from how it usually works, so can easily lead to confusion.

Selecting the filename by itself is better, but I expect selecting a directory first to be common, so then the filename suggestion is limited.

Given that we autosave, I honestly think it's fine for saving to require explicit naming.

[postpostscript]

The simplest way I can think of to do this would be to get rid of that section, and to use the suggested file in the normalized file selector file, only if the input ends with "/":

If you press enter or click Choose, it'll select that file. By default when selecting a directory, that normalized file uses "/.livemd", so I think it'd be an improvement

Thanks for the feedback!

[jonatanklosko]

I did consider this option before and actually liked it. My concern is that we need to compute the unique filename at least once per directory switch, and computing the unique file name requires one call to the filesystem (i.e. listing directory contents to figure out what name is not used). We support pluggable filesystems like S3, so we want to avoid extra API calls.

By default when selecting a directory, that normalized file uses "/.livemd"

Note that in that case the user can't actually click "Choose", it's just a preview, so as they type it prepends to .livemd. Maybe we shouldn't show the extension when a directory is selected, though showing the directory is also kinda weird.