I frequently share or publish notebooks, try out some changes, and often end up in the same place where I started. Whenever I do this, I see the ‘Reshare’ prompt at the top, and then I start to wonder what actual changes I’ve made. I’ve tried to use the ‘View Changes’ function to see, but I found that view can be pretty confusing – in the special but pathological case where you have no actual diffs. I think it would be more intuitive if the ‘Reshare’ and ‘Publish’ buttons didn’t prompt you unless there were actual changes to be applied.
Thanks for the feedback. Using content hashing to detect whether there are unpublished changes is something we’re considering.
In the meantime, if you want to revert back to your previously-published state and discard your changes, you can click Revert in the notebook menu. This also causes the prompt to reshare or republish to go away.
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Hi @jflatow thanks again for the feedback! In addition to reverting as Mike suggests, one other thing that might be useful as you’re viewing your notebook history is the “compare to latest” view which will display a nicely-formatted diff with an older version.
Open the History pane ("…" > “View History”) and navigate to an older version (e.g. the published version), then click the “…” notebook menu again and select “Compare to latest”:
Then you should see a rich diff highlighting differences in green/red so you can more easily see what has (not) been changed, like this:
Hope that helps!
I made a github bug report: https://github.com/observablehq/feedback/issues/47
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