Notebooks are currently very eager to re-execute cell contents. They’ll re-run whenever you change focus to another cell.
Is there a setting to disable automatic execution and only re-run the notebook when explicitly requested (for example with shift + enter)?
The current behavior is not great when refactoring a notebook where you need to temporarily break things. As soon as you change focus to another cell to edit, the notebook re-runs, changes your scroll position in the editor (due to missing broken plots), and lights-up with a bunch of errors that I’m not interested in seeing yet.
I don’t think you can quite do this; that reactive behavior is one of the main features of Observable. The closest you could probably get would be to view the notebook in Safe Mode. Unfortunately, the only way I know to get to Safe Mode is to go to your Notebook Tab and click on the three dot contextual menu for the notebook you want:
If you have an expensive cell and want to temporarily stop it from evaluating while you edit another cell upstream having a syntax error will stop it from executing too. Just add some random character to that cell and remove it when you are done?
We have plans to revisit our … and notebook menu structures. Thanks for the feedback!
Also, you probably know this, but you can just add “/safe” to the url to force safe mode for a notebook.
