I wrote an alternative export format for Observable notebooks, so you can download them as a single file (not a zip) and run them locally on a

file://

domain, instead of having to run a local webserver. I was blown away at how fast they load (<200ms) and you can just double click them from the OS so there is not much overheads to sharing something. Often they work offline too (unfortunately not Plot yet, its too big to bundle by default so I think I would need to be smart about that one). The top 120 Observable notebooks are preprogrammed demo exports, so you can see what it they look like without thinking. While testing it I rediscovered gpu-boids, damn, that thing is cool.

I am very excited to try this out, thank you! Having notebooks run without a server is extremely helpful for sharing prototypes with people. ❤️

Now I added a userspace cell editor, which can edit the source code of dependancies. Great for adding debugger expression to remote sources. https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/editable-exports The changes are ephemeral, unless you pair it with the single file exporter, which will export the changes too. Both survive export, so that combination becomes a fully self-hosted, single file, offline environment. However, there is no way to control the layout of the notebook so its not actually that useful yet. Useful for debugging things.