Prevent interactive window from snapping to bottom on new output

[janosh]

I'd like to suggest either adding an option for or (better still in my opinion) making it the default for the Python interactive window not to jump to the bottom every time a new cell output is generated. That effectively makes it impossible to inspect previous results nearer the top of the window while a computation is still in progress and producing new output.

[rchiodo]

You could add a setting for this if you wanted to. I don't think we're going to change the default to not scroll though. Maybe we could change how it behaves though. Only scroll to the bottom when the cells in progress are all finished.

[janosh]

Only scroll to the bottom when the cells in progress are all finished.

That'd be much better already! FWIW, I honestly don't think many people appreciate windows scrolling themselves though.

[rchiodo]

Our original thought is it's much like any other output window that auto scrolls to the bottom. You want to see the last piece of output. This is like say build output, or a chat window.

We might also limit this ability to only do so if the window is already scrolled to the bottom. Some other continuous outputting windows do that.

[janosh]

Some other continuous outputting windows do that.

That's true. And if you're already at the bottom, it definitely makes sense to keep the window there. As for jumping to the bottom when all work is finished, I'm still not sure it's better to do do it than not to. But like you said, a setting for that would probably be best.

[greazer]

We should disable auto-scroll if the user isn't at the bottom of the history window. Just like the output window in VSCode and VS.

[greazer]

@DavidKutu See microsoft/vscode-python#5317 as well

[janosh]

We should disable auto-scroll if the user isn't at the bottom of the history window. Just like the output window in VSCode and VS.

Couldn't agree more. 👍 This is my number one remaining pain point. Pretty much everything else about the Python experience in VSCode has gotten really awesome.

[DavidKutu]

We should disable auto-scroll if the user isn't at the bottom of the history window. Just like the output window in VSCode and VS.

Couldn't agree more. 👍 This is my number one remaining pain point. Pretty much everything else about the Python experience in VSCode has gotten really awesome.

You can try it out now on master.
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python

[janosh]

It's fine by me to close this or is anything still missing?

[rchiodo]

We don't usually close things until they ship in the official release. That won't be till the end of the month.

[rchiodo]

@DavidKutu did you see @janosh 's comment on your PR for this? It looks like in some cases it's not working correctly.

[janosh]

@DavidKutu I can't reply to your question in the PR as it's locked as resolved and limited to collaborators, hence my reply here.

Hi @janosh I'll be checking this today. Do you by any chance have the code that's generating the large output? Is it a large plot?

Yes or even just displaying regular sized dataframes. Running this code for instance will cause dataframes to extend outside the viewport without the interactive window snapping to bottom.

#%%
import IPython
import pandas as pd

#%%
df = pd.DataFrame(pd.np.random.randint(1, 10, (10, 10)))

#%%
for i in range(10):
    IPython.display.display(df)

[DavidKutu]

Thank you @janosh!

[yohei-h]

Is it possible to select the previous version in Preferences? I want to enable auto-scroll.

[rchiodo]

You could do that and turn off auto updates by installing it from here:
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python/releases/tag/2019.8.30787

However David is about to release a fix for the auto scrolling. Like in the next couple of hours.

[yohei-h]

Thank you, @rchiodo!

[rchiodo]

A new release just went out with the fix for this.

This one here:
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python/releases/tag/2019.9.34911

[DavidKutu]

@janosh
The release from today fixes it.

[janosh]

Nice! Fix confirmed. It now sticks to the bottom like a charm.

I had to install it from VSIX to get the latest changes even though I set "python.insidersChannel": "daily". Was this fix not included in the insider's build?

[rchiodo]

Insider's build is having trouble at the moment. This was shipped as a release fix though, so the main vsix should have it.