[goodside]

Until recently, I also thought this was a major problem. My old solution was to always pair .ipynb files with proper .py modules of the same name, so the .ipynb always starts with `%run foo.py` and just calls functions.

However, I recently started using VSCode Insiders the preview release of VSCode, which has amazing support for Jupyter notebooks in the editor. You can use your normally configured linters, auto-formatters, vi-mode keyboard shortcuts (major selling point for me). You even get legible, cell-aware diffs when comparing in git. Now, the edit/git workflow for .ipynb files is so close to parity I've stopped caring whether code is in a proper Python module or not, and I almost never run Jupyter Notebook or Jupyter Lab in the browser.

In some ways this is a loss, because it's nice to have project-wide linting and other tooling that only work with .py files, but using `%run` was always an imperfect abstraction. By default, `%run` executes modules in a new module namespace which is then copied over, so it's not exactly "paste into Jupyter" unless you do `%run -i`. Even then, it's limited by running all at once. Every cell in a typical Notebook is effectively a button that runs an `exec()` statement, and you can't achieve those semantics by calling Python functions.

[kenward]

I've been using the VSCode Insider's release as well and have been loving it and the new native notebook features for all the reasons you've listed already.

That's an interesting solution. I believe this is similar to what Joel Grus does [0], except %s/jupyter/ipython.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jiPeIFXb6U