Feature request: work on page scrolling/losing current view on cell re-evaluation

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Hi All,

Not sure how much you all are working on “developer experience” with Observable – I realize it is a prototyping+ tool, not an IDE, but just wanted to share that probably my biggest gripe is when I’m working in cell A, and I need to go look at something in cell C – and leaving cell A in its current state is going to throw an error – and somehow after I go to look at C and the notebook re-evaluates, the notebook scrolls to somewhere that is neither A nor C and I have no idea where I am. I feel like I lose so much time to this. :frowning:

I don’t think that this is a systematic description of the issue, but it is one example of this occurring. Let me know if you need a reproduceable example. It would be wonderful if anything could be done about it in the future.

Thank you!

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Thanks for the feedback. We do care deeply about the editing experience and we’re working on major editor improvements that include adopting CSS overflow-anchor to minimize scrolling when something above the viewport resizes (such as a cell’s output).

In the interim, one way to reduce scrolling is to open your notebook in two windows, side-by-side, with one in safe mode. If you edit in safe mode, you can view the live output in the other window without having to scroll up and down.

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Good news and thanks for the tip! I had done the side by side thing before but not with safe mode – which means that caused its own issue occasionally. I’ll give that a shot for the time being.