Managing your notebooks
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg118018] Managing your notebooks
- From: Jason Quinn <jason.lee.quinn at gmail.com>
- Date: Sat, 9 Apr 2011 07:10:43 -0400 (EDT)
I was curious if anybody would be willing to share there strategy for managing their Mathematica notebook versions. In my experience, Mathematica notebooks are "fragile" because running the code is not cleanly separated from using the code. Notebooks indicate modification after a cell is run even if no changes to the code were made. In practice, after using a notebook for a while, it's easy to forget if changes were actually made that you would want to keep, so when you are prompted to save a notebook, you are left with a dilemma. Staying safe, you save again and again which leads to a proliferation of versions. I am aware you can make cells edit protected but this doesn't solve the problem. I also know about the "Notebook history" feature, which seems to be of very limited value. I always end up with so many "versions" of my notebooks that I forget what the differences between them are. I can't help but feel that I'm missing something. I have no problems managing compiled code or interpreted scripts but notebooks are much more challenging. Is this something you experience as well. Have you too noticed extra difficulty managing your mathematica notebooks? Comments? Suggestions? Jason