TIL you can edit one notebook from multiple tabs/windows at once to create split-screen set-ups

Thought this was a fun little feature, wanted to share it:

There is this trick that I sometimes use with Google Docs when editing and rewriting some large document, which is opening it in multiple tabs and/or windows . Because Google Docs has collaborative editing features, this gives you multiple carets in separate views, as if you were two or more separate users editing the same document. Google doesn’t care that you are on the same account. This means I can easily compare two paragraphs side by side, or navigate quickly to specific parts.

As you can see, I just tried this out with an Observable notebook, and it works here too! I don’t recall reading that being explained in any of the introduction notebooks. Because the keyboard shortcuts for moving cells up and down is currently were broken on Linux this actually helped me a lot last weekend.

edit: so that problem is already fixed (yay!), but this can still be useful when you need to look up specific parts of the document very often. Also, using safe mode for the second/third/etc. can help avoid performance issues if the notebook is really resource-intense.

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This is mentioned (perhaps a bit understatedly) in the tutorial notebook “How saving works”:

If you open your notebook in multiple tabs, you’ll see your saved changes propagate immediately.

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Have you tried the new Control-Shift-Up and Control-Shift-Down keyboard shortcuts on Linux we announced yesterday?

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:+1: :partying_face:

Thanks for the heads-up, I missed that announcement! Will edit the opening post

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