Dashboard sorting

[takluyver]

• Hide directories beginning with _ (Hide __pycache__ in dashboard directory list #5152)
• Case-insensitive sorting (Case-insesitive sort for dashboard list #5151), including an attempt at locale-aware sorting, although this doesn't pick up obvious characters like é on my machine.

Possibly ordering should be done by the frontend, but we're already relying on the order from the API to get index.ipynb and directory names before other things.

[takluyver]

Removed the attempt at locale-aware sorting for now - the locale.strxfrm() function is bytes only on Python 2, and dealing with that properly seems like more trouble than it's worth.

[ivanov]

in #5152 @minrk also suggested hiding directories that start with a ., do you disagree with that?

Personally, I think it's weird to hide directories that start with an underscore - some people rename files/directories to have a leading _ as a way to ensure they are listed first. But if we're going to hide those directories, we should also hide directories that start with a dot.

Hiding __pycache__ and only __pycache__ makes more sense to me - it is the least surprising behavior.

[minrk]

If special casing __pycache__ makes more sense to other people, I have no problem with that. It's better for people to see some uninteresting dirs listed than not see interesting ones.

[takluyver]

I believe the existing logic hides folders that begin with a dot. I did add
a test for that.

No strong feelings on whether to hide everything with a leading underscore
or special case pycache.

[ellisonbg]

There are other calls to is_hidden where we probably want to add the _ test as well:

• I think a few other places in filenbmanager.py
• /IPython/html/base/handlers.py L263
• ./IPython/html/tree/handlers.py L65

[takluyver]

I was deliberately leaving other locations so that _ directories were hidden from the list but still accessible (like _private attributes in Python), while we outright ban access to . directories like .ssh. I'm happy to reconsider that, though.

What do you feel about hiding all _ prefixed directories vs. special casing __pycache__?

[minrk]

I think I lean toward special-casing __pycache__ at this point.

[takluyver]

After discussion with @minrk , we're back to special casing __pycache__, but there's now a configurable list of glob patterns to hide directories and files from the dashboard listing, in common with what many editors implement. The implementation is deliberately simple, but a more complex implementation could have better performance.

Our hiding of .hidden directories is still hardcoded, because we prevent access to them even if you could see them.

[richardeverson]

It would be really useful to list notebooks and directories in reverse order of modification, so that one can easily navigate to recently used notebooks. Modifying the sort_key function easily achieves this, but changing the javascript etc to allow switching between alphabetic and modification time views is more complicated than I've time for now and has layout implications for the dashboard. An imperfect halfway house would be to configure the sort key from ipython_notebook_config.py.

[ivanov]

We plan to have more sophisticated sorting in the dashboard in
IPython 3.0