[IPython-dev] magics and metadata

[Jonathan Taylor]

That's the sort of use case I imagine as well, where a cell magic wants
to about something to the frontend a little more information about what
kind of cell it is (in your %%bash example, it would be a code cell for
which the code_mirror might use bash highlighting instead of python). This
seems like it could be accomplished with something parallel to
"publish_display_data" for cell metadata which different frontends can
handle differently.

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 8:49 AM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 19 June 2012 16:08, Jonathan Taylor <jonathan.taylor at stanford.edu>
> wrote:
> > Yes, it would not be good to have the API of cell magics be notebook
> > specific. What about providing a reference to the current cell metadata
> in
> > the Magics class that can be used to update the NotebookNode after
> executing
> > cell.input? So, cell_magics would not have access to the metadata on
> > execution but could pass any metadata it wanted to back to the notebook.
>
> Before we get too far into the mechanism, let's try to think about
> actual use cases, so we can figure out how things need to work.
>
> We can also see cell magics themselves as a sort of within-cell
> metadata. For example, the frontend might one day be aware that if a
> cell starts with %%bash, different syntax highlighting and tab
> completion rules apply to it. I think this would need to be within the
> frontend, rather than going through the kernel, because we want to use
> the new highlighting & completion before the cell is executed.
>
> Thomas
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-- 
Jonathan Taylor
Dept. of Statistics
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390 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305
Tel:   650.723.9230
Fax:   650.725.8977
Web: http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~jtaylo
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