Notebook themes

[kieferrm]

We should introduce the notion of notebook themes that can combine colors and layout. As a user I can associate a viewType with a certain notebook theme. This idea came up in a discussion with @rebornix.

[gramster]

Can I give this 100 upvotes? I personally love dark themes in my code editors but light themes when working with notebooks (don't ask why, it's not necessarily rational). I would love to have separate notebook themes as a result. It might even make sense to default to a light theme for notebooks (for Jupyter notebook users benefit).

[greazer]

This could help address some of the problems I ran into personally with trying to visually process the state of my notebook at any given time. I.e. which cell is selected, which is in edit mode, etc. I know we have separate color tokens for notebook stuff, but having a notebook theme as a 1st class citizen of VS Code would help in discoverability.

[claudiaregio]

+1 from customer email I received mid March.

[claudiaregio]

+1 from survey monkey feedback

[g-simmons]

+1

[claudiaregio]

+1 customer feedback

[claudiaregio]

+1 customer feedback

[roblourens]

Starting to think about a concept for a basic profile, I imagine a few parts:

• A profile is a set of notebook.* settings/values
• VS Code probably provides some builtin profiles
• An extension can declare a profile in package.json. Example:

"notebookProfiles": {
    "deepnote": {
        "notebook.cellToolbarVisibility": "hover",
        "notebook.showCellStatusBar": false
    }
}

• Maybe an extension can also declare a default profile when registering a content provider, not sure about that
• A user can configure a profile per-view type, like

"notebook.profile": {
    "github-issues": "zenMode",
    "*": "vscode"
}

• A user setting will override that value in the selected profile (?)

• We need some way to override values per-profile, or customize profiles

  • We could take inspiration from terminal.profiles and let the user declare profiles in their settings

  "notebook.profiles": {
      "myprofile": {
          "extends": "jupyter", // optional
          "notebook.lineNumbers": "off"
      }
  }

  • or a simpler override like

  "notebook.lineNumbers": {
      "jupyter": "off"
  }

  • or invert it, I think this is my preference

  "notebook.profileOverrides": {
      "jupyter": {
          "notebook.lineNumbers": "off"
      }
  }

  • We've talked about a generic solution for custom setting scopes, like language-scoped settings, but we should start by thinking about this on its own without including that complicated issue

Things to think about

• How does the user know what settings are in the profile?
• Understanding settings scopes is already complicated. This adds more places the user has to look to figure out "what is the value of setting X in notebook Y?"
• What sort of custom settings editor experience can we add to make this easier?
  • One easy idea, add a special settings editor search query like @notebookProfile:jupyter which filters the settings list to notebook settings. If the user edits them, they get saved in the right way. This is also a solution for language scopes that I've thought about.

[roblourens]

The current plan for this feature, as implemented in insiders, is the following

• If the user has ever opened a notebook, a new task is available on the Getting Started page to pick a notebook "profile" (although we don't use that word in the UI)
  
• A notebook profile is just a set of values for notebook layout settings. When the user clicks a profile option, it will apply the profile settings to their user settings
• The first time the user opens a notebook, we will open the Getting Started page with the notebook profile picker to the side (this is hidden behind a setting notebook.experimental.openGettingStarted, and I plan to keep it that way for this release)

Jupyter team, please take a look at the current settings for the profile labelled Jupyter, we can change them. We are still tweaking all the profiles and the preview images. Also, today's (6/1) Insiders is missing the images from the build, they will appear tomorrow.

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/src/vs/workbench/contrib/notebook/browser/contrib/profile/notebookProfile.ts#L29-L37