Disable "Delete Notebooks" option...

[Tony Hirst]

Having just accidentally deleted a load of notebooks (that I'd fortunately got copies of in a recent zip bundle) by not checking which notebooks were ticked when I clicked delete, I wonder if it would make sense to update the message that currently has a form that is easy to be blind to:

Are you sure you want to permanently delete the N files/folders selected?

to show a full listing off the notebooks to be deleted and some mechanism that guards against a blind, quick 'double tap' unthinking delete? Or perhaps as well as raising the confirmation dialogue, highlighting with a red background all the notebooks that are about to be deleted?

Also, as a paranoid educator, fearful of distance education students deleting all their work by mistake, I wonder:

- is there a way I can disable the display of the delete button,...

- or force it to only ever allow the deletion of one notebook at a time...

- or find some way of preventing it from deleting running notebooks 

- or not delete the files but put then into a bin somewhere in a timestamped folder from which they can be recovered?

At the moment, it seems just too easy to do something really bad (not least, having the delete button close to all the other buttons? Why not put it far to the right hand side? 

[Matthias Bussonnier]

Hi Tony. 

Thanks for this calm mail I know some people that would have sent a more angry one. 

On Jun 19, 2015, at 16:07, Tony Hirst <tony....@gmail.com> wrote:

Having just accidentally deleted a load of notebooks (that I'd fortunately got copies of in a recent zip bundle) by not checking which notebooks were ticked when I clicked delete, I wonder if it would make sense to update the message that currently has a form that is easy to be blind to:

Are you sure you want to permanently delete the N files/folders selected?

to show a full listing off the notebooks to be deleted and some mechanism that guards against a blind, quick 'double tap' unthinking delete? Or perhaps as well as raising the confirmation dialogue, highlighting with a red background all the notebooks that are about to be deleted?

Well right now, the dialog should have you click on a red delete explicitly, which should not be selected by default. 

Which is already 2 step more that shutdown that don’t warn IIRC, but we can try to make it difficult. 

Maybe Like github delete repo ? type the word delete in the field to allow user to press delete ?

Also, as a paranoid educator, fearful of distance education students deleting all their work by mistake, I wonder:

- is there a way I can disable the display of the delete button,...

Yes you can do that with your custom.js, I have to check how exactly. 

- or force it to only ever allow the deletion of one notebook at a time...

I think that would be annoying for many people, but we can consider it. 

- or find some way of preventing it from deleting running notebooks 

We can consider that too. 

- or not delete the files but put then into a bin somewhere in a timestamped folder from which they can be recovered?

That is annoyingly difficult to do right in a cross-platform an reliable manner. 

Note that after deletion, you might still have the backup in .ipynb_checkpoint.

At the moment, it seems just too easy to do something really bad (not least, having the delete button close to all the other buttons? Why not put it far to the right hand side? 

Then it would be close to the “new” button I guess. 

I would suggest for you to open an issues on jupyter/notebook to follow how we sole this issue. 

We have a new student UI/UX designer for the summer have can work on that maybe. 

Thanks for your feedback. 

-- 

Matthias

[Thomas Kluyver]

On 19 June 2015 at 07:07, Tony Hirst <tony....@gmail.com> wrote:

- or not delete the files but put then into a bin somewhere in a timestamped folder from which they can be recovered?

I think this is the best thing to do from a user perspective. Instead of 'are you sure' dialogs, which half the time you click through without thinking anyway, just allow them to undo deleting files. I like the way GMail does this:

- No confirmation at all - when I'm doing the right thing, I don't need to click anything extra.

- After deletion, a clear 'undo' button appears, so if I immediately realise I made a mistake, I can resolve it with one click

- If I realise my mistake later, I can get back anything deleted in the last 30 days

Only keeping 30 days of stuff might sound like a limitation, but I think it's a really important feature of the design. Desktop 'recycle bins', which keep everything until you empty them, always seem to end up in one of two modes: either the user ends up shift-deleting (bypassing the bin) to save themselves the hassle of emptying it, or it accumulates thousands of things, and you're scared of emptying it because maybe there's something important in all those files.

As Matthias said, it may be harder to do that really well on different platforms. But I think it's worth considering, because it is a nicer user experience if we can do it.

Thomas

[Damián Avila]

I really like the "undo" idea , and I also think it's worth considering it....

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Damián Avila

[Will Whitney]

Undo is the classic solution to this problem. Thomas is absolutely correct about the reasoning here.

Even if doing the right thing from a UX perspective is a little bit harder, we should still do it. Especially when the alternative is having our users lose their work.

[Tony Hirst]

Hi Matthias

Thanks for the comments back - issue opened here: https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/issues/165

[Nikolay Voronchikhin]

Hi, when will "Undo" or "Disable Trash" options be available in a future release of Jupyter Notebook?

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Saturday, June 20, 2015 at 2:07:15 AM UTC+12, Tony Hirst wrote:

Having just accidentally deleted a load of notebooks ...

-1 for “Are You Sure”.

My MO is to treat my “Jupyter Notebooks” directory as a work area. Anything important I want to keep, I save and copy elsewhere.