Then R also had RMarkdown which allows to have notebooks with executable cells (code chunks) and they play much nicer with version control than .ipynb files.
What I was referring to in my previous post is working with a .R file (which is plain text) in RStudio. If my cursor is on a single line which is also one statement, ctrl/cmd + enter executes that statement and shows me the output in the console or in a separate pane for plots. If the cursor is within a multi-line expression such as a plot declaration, beginning of a loop, function declaration, then the interpreter figures out that I want to run multiple lines and executes the whole loop/declares function/creates plot. Or I can also select some code and run it.
Ideally, this is the kind of behaviour that I'd like to replicate with a .py file. It's a nice interactive workflow and also solves the problems that jupyter has with version control.
I use cells/notebooks in Python, so I can keep my code organized and run computationally intensive things once... Is this something that is not needed in R?