shelldon VS comint-mime

I obviously don't separate the input and the output area personally since my RET command does a good enough job most of the time. But I think the sheldon package does this https://github.com/Overdr0ne/shelldon.

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