I would like it if LiveBook could update itself after I make changes to the livemd file

[Sleepful]

I am learning livebook and loving it.
There's just one scenario that I think it could support better.
Sometimes I want to jump into my editor to make some larger code changes, I can open the .livemd file easily.
However if a LiveBook process is running with the .livemd file, it will not read the changes that I make to the file outside of LiveBook, it will always overwrite it.
Is there a way around this? does it make sense to add this functionality?

Stopping the livebook process, making changes to the .livemd file and then opening the file with livebook works fine, but it is a lot of steps.

[jonatanklosko]

Hey @Sleepful :)

Unfortunately this is not trivial because Livebook autosaves the notebook to the file and it assumes that whatever it has is the source of truth. Technically we could track the last file content and try to merge the changes, however that's not something we have currently planned.

Note that you don't have to kill the whole Livebook to stop autosaving, you just need to close the session. But yeah, doing that often is not convenient.

[Sleepful]

That would be the point of the button, it indicates that file changes are to take precedence and the entire state can be reset to opening the file for the first time. It makes it more convenient to restart a notebook without having to go through the work of closing the notebook (and the process) and re-opening the file. A bit of a UX thing for anyone that wants/likes to use their own editor on a livemd file every once in a while.

[josevalim]

We plan to add starred and recently opened to the Home page, so closing the session and reopening it should at least be easier. We will be glad to consider the button in the future but not the moment right now. :)

[Sleepful]

@josevalim that would alleviate the process a lot! Currently I like to bookmark my sessions so I can come back to them quickly without browsing through the folder directory, but as you know, the bookmark stops working after closing a session.

[jonatanklosko]

@Sleepful if that helps you can open a notebook from CLI by doing livebook server /path/to/notebook.livemd and do it via browser by going to http://localhost:8080/open?path=/path/to/notebook.livemd

[cd-slash]

This functionality would definitely speed workflows when using cursor or another LLM - I typically have Cursor open alongside my livebook and ask it to make changes, which works well as long as the livebook is closed and then re-opened.

Checking the hash of the file compared to the last save would presumably reveal if it's been changed outside LiveBook, and an option could be given to open the modified file (presumably not maintaining output / state). This seems similar to how other native apps handle external changes and would work well for me, since modifying externally is not the norm.