Notebook Features Zed Should Support

[ebenezergelo]

I really love Zed — it’s fast, elegant, and incredibly well-designed. The only drawback for me as a data scientist is the lack of proper Jupyter notebook support. I work heavily with .ipynb files, and while the REPL-style cells help, they don’t quite match the full interactive experience needed for data workflows.

1. Native .ipynb UI
   • Render notebook cells with clear visual boundaries.
   • Support markdown + rich media (images, inline plots, LaTeX).
   • Allow reordering cells via drag-and-drop; adding/deleting cells.

2. Interactive Execution
   • Select individual or multiple cells to run, yielding inline outputs.
   • Display output types: text, tables, charts, HTML alongside cells.
   • Assign kernels (e.g., Python, R, Julia) via dropdown or status bar.

3. Seamless Editing
   • Edit markdown and code directly in-place.
   • VS‑Code–style shortcuts (Shift+Enter, Ctrl+Enter) to run current cell.
   • Show execution status (busy/success/error indicators).

4. Kernel Management
   • List available kernels and switch easily.
   • Connect to remote kernels (SSH, Docker, JupyterHub).
   • Restart kernel option, clear outputs, and manage state.

5. Advanced Features
   • Variable explorer to inspect current namespace.
   • Table of contents for navigation.
   • Support saving/loading .ipynb, converting to/from script formats.
   • Full support for Jupyter metadata and cell tags.

6. Collaboration & Integration
   • Real-time collaboration with shared notebook editing and execution.
   • Integration with existing Zed features: AI assistant, multibuffer, terminal, Git.
   • Optionally allow exporting notebooks (HTML, PDF) directly from Zed.

[Slipstream-Max]

so how to use ipynb for now in zed? is it the only way is to export ipynb as py then run py file?

[ebenezergelo]

Sadly, I use PyCharm whenever I'm working on notebooks. It hogs up a lot of memory though.

[Slipstream-Max]

Oh,sad to hear that. PyCharm is pretty heavy indeed. I'ill still use vscode for editing notebook though.