code-cells.el VS envrc

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

buffer-env: A pure-Elisp version of the direnv utility. Useful to make Emacs aware of Python virtualenvs (which, judging by the questions posted here, is unfortunately still a complication for a lot of people). Similar to (and inspired by) envrc, but doesn't require the direnv program.

Yes, most Nix users employ https://direnv.net or the equivalent for your IDE of choice. Emacs for instance has https://github.com/purcell/envrc which set per-buffer variables.

Also take a look at the envrc package. I think it handles multiple projects better.

I further make my software projects so that when I click a link I go into an environment pre-loaded with their dependencies so dropping in/out of projects is always frictionless. I do this with the reproducibility guarantees of nix, along with glue like nix-direnv and envrc-mode to direnv.

In conjunction with installing direnv on your favorite text editor, it's a very hassle free experience. Everything happens automatically. If you use Emacs, i higly recommend envrc.el

Direnv is installed using the nix-direnv installation instructions under "Via configuration.nix in NixOS". I read some recommendations that envrc.el is a better alternative then direnv.el, and after some testing I have to agree. (envrc-global-mode) is enabled in my config. This works perfectly with a normal emacs instance.

I don't use flake.nix, only shell.nix, though check if the envrc package works any better for you. https://github.com/purcell/envrc

As an alternative to emacs-direnv, I’d recommend the “envrc” package.

btw, my main issue regarding tramp was the fact that I didn't have my environment generated by direnv, via the https://github.com/purcell/envrc package. I use direnv almost exclusively to activate my nix-shell, so I can access the exact software dependencies required by that directory of a project.

I'm not familiar with these tools too but I highly recommend to look at https://github.com/purcell/envrc. If you are not familiar with direnv I suggest to try it with nix-shell/flakes before.