What is Command Mode and Edit Mode?

What’s with all the green and blue borders?!?

Callisto, like Jupyter Notebooks, has a modal user interface. This means that the keyboard does different things depending on which mode the Notebook is in. There are two modes: edit mode and command mode.

Edit mode is indicated by a green cell border and a prompt showing in the source field.

When a cell is in edit mode, you can type into the cell, like a normal text editor.

Enter edit mode by pressing Enter or using the mouse to click on a cell’s editor area.

Command mode is indicated by a blue cell border.

When you are in command mode, you are able to edit the notebook as a whole, but not type into individual cells. Most importantly, in command mode, the keyboard is mapped to a set of shortcuts that let you perform notebook and cell actions efficiently.

For example, if you are in command mode and you press c, you will copy the current cell – no modifier is needed.