Interpretation of "Live Execution Time" setting about jupyterlab-execute-time

[krassowski]

I assumed the Live Execution Time setting could be used to control whether the start time of a cell execution could be displayed, but that appears not to be the case

No, this setting controls whether the timer showing the execution time is shown. To give a python analogy, it controls whether a timedelta is shown, but what your arrow is pointing to is a datetime. When it is enabled, it will show Execution started at {datetime} {timedelta} where timedelta will continue updating live which may be distracting for some users (hence the opt-out setting).

Maybe the description should be updated? Do you have suggestions how to make it more clear to users? Feel welcome to open a PR, the code for it is here:

jupyterlab-execute-time/schema/settings.json

Line 41 in c020582

"description": "Show the current execution time (last execution time) as a cell executes.",

If your issue is then asking about a new feature to disable showing execution start time, I wonder if this should be controlled by the same setting as controls whether to show the date after the execution is complete:

Disabling that setting currently makes the following difference:

Enabled	Disabled

or does it make sense to make it a separate setting? We also have a failed state which shows the start datetime, see:

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[psychemedia]

ah, ok with the interpretation. I hadn't noticed the timer updating live (maybe I was only checkiung that setting on long running cells when it was off).

I'm offline and off-grid now-ish till next week. Will try to contribute back into docs when I get back.

Re: new feature - yes, essentially a combination of settings that lead to a similar UI effect (at least) of disabling the extension and not displaying anything. (If all outputs are disabled, I guess the timer doesn't actually need to start at all.)

My use case is: we are exploring a student facing JupyterLab environment where student users do not have permission to enable/disable/uninstall certain extensions. That said, if students really want to disable features that we have enabled by default, via a user setting, it's handy for them to be able to do so.