It is an interesting point. In my usage, I don't view it as a one-or-the-other proposition. I use Julia, so if I'm doing some exploratory work and experimentation, or making something to present results, then the IJulia notebook is great. If I'm writing some serious longer-running stuff, or a package, I'm in an editor. Sometimes I'll write code in a separate file and call it from a notebook just to keep the notebook focussed on communicating something, and "hiding" the details.

Yeah, notebooks are great for experimentation but not so much for anything that needs to be reused.

I tend to write prototype code in the notebook then copy/paste it into a package as I become satisfied that the code is correct.

I wrote notedown precisely so that I could edit notebooks in my text editor and version control them as plain text.

It would be good to be able to transparently edit a .ipynb in a text editor - I've been meaning to wrap notedown in a vim plugin but haven't had time. This still leaves the version control problem though.

Note that I recently enabled the reverse (editing markdown in the browser as if it was a notebook), enabled by setting the following in ~/.ipython/profile_default/ipython_notebook_config.py (or similar):

    c.NotebookApp.contents_manager_class = 'notedown.NotedownContentsManager'

This is useful for more interactive work, e.g. iterating on plots, whilst still having everything stored in markdown. See [1] for more info.

[1]: https://github.com/aaren/notedown/issues/22

I've been a big fan of TFK's EIN. Unfortunately, TFK no longer maintains the project and I have not had good luck with the various EIN forks. (Anyone else having better experiences?) I still get by with the original EIN by using older versions of ipython/IPyNB. Moreover, the IPyNB technology is getting somewhat bloated with widgets and whatnot and I don't know how that will integrate with an emacs environment. Nevertheless, I still hope emacs modes similar to EIN will be forthcoming in this area. I was hoping to propose a code sprint on this topic at SciPy this year, but I won't be going to Austin, alas.

Jetbrains also have support https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/help/ipython-notebook-supp...