I haven't fully understood the issue with the list showing the previous directory yet, but what I have found is that:

• I can trigger it by creating a new text file or a directory, as well as a new notebook.
• Theonpopstate() handler we add is getting called, for some reason.

Educated guesswork led me to useevent.preventDefault() on the links that make new files and folders, which seems to fix the issue with the files list jumping back to a previous state.

@gnestor@Carreau if you have a chance to review this, I think the issue is worth doing a 5.3.2 bugfix release for. I can make the release tomorrow if this gets merged.

Haven't looked at notebook codebase in a while but this look good to me.
Happy if we make a 5.3.2.

Thanks for fixing this@takluyver! I think that releasing a patch for this is a good idea as it's a regression that was reported by several people. Let me know if I can help with that 👍

I've released 5.4 to PyPI with the fix (and a few other changes). Now to update conda-forge.