Setting up the Environment

Literary's notebook importer is enabled by default using a special literary.pth site config file. This supports side-effects at runtime, and leads to the Literary notebook finder being registered with sys.path_hooks. In order for notebooks to be importable, the notebook directories should be on sys.path. When using the Hatch backend, this can be done by performing an editable install of the current project. For other backends, you should manually set sys.path e.g. via $PYTHONPATH.

Why doesn't the IPython extension handle this for the user? Fundamentally, Literary should be about adding missing features to Jupyter/IPython to support working with notebooks as first class libraries. Anything that can already by done by e.g. a project manager should be handled by other tools. This means that Literary interoperates better with existing standards, and has a lower complexity.