Allow notebook tools to affect multiple cells.

[markellekelly]

My proposal is that we allow notebook-tools to affect multiple cells at a time.

Right now, when multiple cells are selected in a notebook, the notebook tools panel still only corresponds to the active cell, without any clear indication that it's doing so. The "Slide Type" dropdown, for example, will still allow you to select a new slide type:

But the slide type is only applied to the active cell, not the other selected cells. The second selected cell still has no slide type:

The expected behavior is that all selected cells are given this new cell-type. Otherwise, the notebook-tools panel should probably prevent users from changing the active cell when multiple cells are selected (e.g. gray out the slide type dropdown).

[markellekelly]

@Zsailer and I came across this problem in relation to the functionality of celltags, which belongs in the notebook tools panel. The multiple selection interaction issue becomes exaggerated in celltags, where the ability to select, filter, and add tags to multiple cells at a time is what makes the extension particularly useful.

[Zsailer]

Pinging @tgeorgeux for thoughts.

[tgeorgeux]

I have a few thoughts, I'll try to dump these briefly.

• I think any action that can be performed on a single cell only (such as editing cell metadata) ought to be disabled when more than one cell is selected.
• Any operation that could reasonably affect multiple selected (such as slide type) should apply to all selected cells.
• Notebook wide operations (such as edit notebook metadata) should remain enabled when multiple cells are selected.
• Cell operations (run, stop, copy, etc.)should affect all selected cells.

I whole-heartedly agree that multiple cell operations should operate on all selected cells, and single-cell operations should be disabled when multiple cells are selected.

[tgeorgeux]

As of now, there seems to be only one field that needs to be disabled. Here's a screenshot of the cell metadata field disabled:

For Styling:
/* Cell Metadata Input /
/ --jp-layout-color2 /
/ --jp-border-color1 */

/* Cell Metadata /
/ --jp-content-font-size1 /
/ --jp-ui-font-color2 */

/* N/A /
/ --jp-content-font-color2 */

One thing we should be careful of is that we don't overwrite and existing cell metadata when we add slide metadata or nbconvert metadata to cell metadata on the non-selected cells.

[krlng]

Any updates on this? In my point of view this would make it much less cumbersome to actually use jupyterlab for presentations.

[daliagachc]

Hi! any updates on this?