code-cells.el VS isearch-mb

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

isearch-mb: A subtle modification to isearch (C-s and friends) giving it a more “normal” feel by today's standards. Basically, allows you to edit the search string while searching. Similar to ctrlf, but less invasive of a change, and arguably more robust.

Of alternatives, if all you want is a minibuffer for Isearch, there is isearch-mb.

CtrlF and Isearch MB also have this behavior.