code-cells.el VS comint-mime

code-cells: Utilities to work with “lightweight notebooks”, that is, source code which is split into cells by special %% comments. Also allows you to transparently edit Jupyter notebook (ipynb) files.

Emacs, Sublime Text 3 and Atom Pulsar can all do this with arbitrary Jupyter kernels with the emacs-jupyter/code-cells, helium and hydrogen packages, respectively.

I've been using code-cells together with emacs-jupyter, the combination of the two lets you work pretty much identically as you would in Atom with Hydrogen, Sublime with Helium, or VSCode with the Jupyter Python extension; you just delimit code cells with #%% and execute in a separate Jupyter REPL buffer. It does require some getting used to the key bindings though (or some tweaking to make it more similar to what you're used to).

I use a similar setup in Emacs with code-cells.el [1]. VSCode had a tendency to choke rendering large interactive graphs in-line, so if I was needing to view in a separate process anyways a little elisp turns "write last IPython output to a tempfile, open, move to workspace N" into a keybind.

[1] https://github.com/astoff/code-cells.el

Try https://github.com/astoff/code-cells.el

I use the simple but very convenient code-cells package to run python cells. E.g. with the Spyder IDE, the cell where the cursor is currently in has a different background color, and I'd love to have that in emacs. Would you have any idea on how to do that?

For scripts with cells there are a couple of packages. Mine is this: https://github.com/astoff/code-cells.el

comint-mime: Adds graphical capabilities to the Python shell (matplotlib, etc.). It's extensible and can be made to work with other Comint modes.

I've never used elpy, so I can't compare for you, but I feel like it is pretty easy to get a comfortable environment with python-mode. Install a python language server and use eglot or lsp-mode. I believe that python-mode is one of the modes that will be getting tree sitter support in emacs 29, which should add some additional enhancements. The only additional python specific package that I use is comint-mime, since I mostly do data/visualization work.

https://github.com/astoff/comint-mime, python mode, and ipython work well for me. Some combination of markdown mode, polymode, quarto, and jupytext can probably get you pretty far with a literate programming style. There’s also the https://github.com/nnicandro/emacs-jupyter package that might be worth checking out.

Finally, as a slight tangent, the comint-mime package will definitely improve the M-x shell experience: https://github.com/astoff/comint-mime.

Yes, it will soon, namely as of Emacs 28: https://github.com/astoff/comint-mime

It would be cool to think a bit about what other uses these fancy Org rendering utilities can have, such as this. The async stuff would probably get in the way if you want to get a propertized/overlayed buffer out of a string. But usually there are several things about the Org API that are inconvenient as a library (such as not autoloading the externally useful functions).

Inline images: interestingly, I was just working on this. It needs Emacs 28, but you can take a look here: https://github.com/astoff/comint-mime