linked cells or split cells

[ggggggggg]

Description

I was hoping to be able to have a cell that does some computation that takes say 30 s, and the rest of the notebook depends on, while also having a nice title on the cell. I tried changing the cell to return mo.md("#title"), but then that re-runs the whole notebook. I would like to edit the title/explanatory text without re-running the cell.

So I tried putting a markdown cell above it. However, since cells can easily be added anywhere, I later found that in the course of debugging I added a cell between the markdown cell and the cell it goes with.

Suggested solution

1. Linked cells, where two cells are linked in that there is no space between them and the UI + and - buttons for creating new cells only offer to create a new cell above the linked pair, or below the linked pair, but not in between. Likewise for moving cells around.
2. Split cells, where a cell has a markdown portion and computation portion, and their gets mo.vstacked behind the scenes. In the ui they are linked together. This maybe just a different description of linked cells?

Alternative

Re-run large portions of the notebook each time I go back to edit the descriptive text that goes with a cell that takes a long time to run.

Additional context

I'm running into this as I have a notebook that does a useful computation for me, but I want to share it with colleagues. I'm adding markdown to each cell, and using md.vstack with the previous output from the cell. This gives a very nice nagivation on the sidebar through markdown headers, and makes it easy for the other users to understand. But the notebook keeps re-evaluating and moving my focus away from where I am typing.

[akshayka]

Thanks for the feedback. I see the use case but in my opinion it is not worth the complexity this would add to our UI and especially implementation at this point. Sorry we can't do more to help!

I'll move this to a discussion for now if you and others would like to continue brainstorming, but at least as proposed we won't be able to take action on it.