Create new notebook based on user-defined templates

[LioSergent]

Description

As a convenience feature, it would be nice to be able to define notebook templates and create new notebooks based on those user-defined templates.

Suggested solution

Templates could be store as .py files in a folder referenced in the marimo.toml. Like snippets are defined.

If templates are detected, add a button "Create new notebook from templates" after :

Are you willing to submit a PR?

• Yes

Alternatives

Another way would be to use 2 or 3 snippets. Main issue for me here is that I could not make a snippet work for the setup cell (and I like having a setup cell because it makes the raw .py file a lot more readable to me).

Additional context

Personally I currently do this with a little click CLI and it is quite practical as I perform a lot of analyses that often start the same way (same db/csv connections, the same code imports, same first steps of data exploration...).
But it requires extra clicks/keypresses (go to terminal, write command, go back to marimo, refresh the file explorer in marimo, click the new file). And it would feel better to stay in the marimo UI.

[mscolnick]

Thanks for the feature request. Do you have thoughts on how this could be implemented? Would it be better to support a "Duplicate notebook" from the home page. and you can just have a folder called /templates?

[LioSergent]

That works too. Actually that's what I used to do when I was working with jupyter.
Also, a "Duplicate notebook" button has additional use cases, I find myself cp notebook_1.py notebook_2.py quite often too.

"Actual" templating feels slightly fancier, and would make user-level templates (outside of projects) more obvious, but would be more cumbersome to implement and setup.

All in all I think you are right, duplicating is probably a better way, at least for now.

[tolgaatam]

We also need "create notebook from template" feature. We want to create a setup cell on all new notebooks by default.

[LioSergent]

So...

Duplicating some base notebooks is OK but it's typically a scroll + 4 or 5 clicks.
Having a basic templating feature would reduce the operation to 2 clicks.

May not sound like a big difference, but lately I found myself creating notebooks in the middle of meetings to check things and in that context every second counts.

I'll try to open a PR with a minimalist templating capability, there should be enough reference code with the tutorials and the snippets features.