This has been an ongoing issue. I moved abc-clone into a stand alone python function and it works well in the notebook. however both the command line AND the notebook version fail quietly when SSH is not setup. We should fix that and provide a useful error message. ideally the message doesn't have to have a big list of repos it can't clone just a check to ensure SSH is setup and a fail with a nice message if it doesn't work.

see notebook in the issue. the other issue is skip_existing should have a default value - i suggest False