The raw representation is a somewhat cluttered (to the untrained eye, anyway) json file - especially if you have checkpointed images which are bascially base64 encoded blobs! So as far as I know it's pretty much the web-editor or nothing at the moment. Obviously a JSON-aware plug-in for something like PyDev or Pycharm would be pretty neat, but I think we're a ways off that. See also http://nbdiff.org/ which solves the issue of comparing version-tracked notebooks.

There are IPython Notebook implementations for VI and Emacs which mirror much of the rich interface of the notebook. However, they do NOT include the Javascript support needed for these rich interfaces. There's also a QT frontend that can display graphics.

IPython is two separate pieces - a core kernel, and a frontend that communicates with it via a published protocol. Anybody can design any client they want to interact with the kernel. The notebook interface in the browser is definitely the richest, in terms of features.

Tangentially related - but if you're a vim fan and want to be able to use the full, in-browser notebook, you can easily set up vim bindings by following these instructions:

http://spaceli.wordpress.com/2013/10/04/add-vim-key-bindings... (the post was for iPython 1.0, but it seems to still work with 2.0)

This feature alone made me 10x more excited to use iPython notebook as a development environment.

IPython has %edit and %run "magics" (and probably some others that I don't know about) that be used for editor-based workflow. There are also some plugins for Vim and Emacs, but I don't have experience with those.

For more involved explorations, I use the editor of my choice and import/reload the script as a module in the notebook.