opening jupytext notebooks in jlab

Hiya

trying to migrate from classic to something more modern, I’m facing an issue that has to do with the awkward path that seems to be the only way to open a jupytext notebook under jlab

• from the UI, clicking say foo.md in the file browser results in a markdown editor; I need to do right-click → open with → Notebook to get it to open as a notebook
• from the outside, I’d need a way to do the same from a regular URL; opening lab/tree/path/foo.md has the same result as from the UI, so I can’t seem to find any way to open it as a notebook from a URL

the first issue is an impediment but of course something I can live with; the second is more of a showstopper for me at this point

I’d love to find a way around this

ps for reference, I’ve be stirring this in a couple other threads already https://discourse.jupyter.org/c/jupyterlab/17 and more marginally in https://github.com/jupyterlab/retrolab/issues/162

in the latter @jtpio suggested that an extension could come in handy, but I must honestly admit that the whole jlab extension ecosystem has scared the hell out of me a bit, so I am unsure what this would actually involve…

[fcollonval]

another option would be to create another package that will just install this configuration file?

Good news, with the newly released JupyterLab server 2.9.0 this could be a thing using the new overrides.d folder.

[astrojuanlu]

I’m currently using .mystnb. The reason is that I think MyST-Parser is registered to parse .md files, and I found some sort of conflict. But honestly I would love to switch to .md because then they would have a nice preview on GitHub. MyST-Parser and MyST-NB were in its infancy when I did the migration and… well, I’ve become an expert in Sphinx and documentation this year 😃 so I might give it a try again.