Productivity: Jupyter notebooks inside an IDE

PyCharm and VS Code are two major Integrated Development Environments (IDE) for Python code. Notebooks are widely used for doing calculations in Python. We are happy to introduce an article by CFM’s Marc Wouts, that discusses how these popular tools can be brought together to increase your productivity.

In recent years, we have witnessed an effort by PyCharm to make notebooks editable in the IDE. But PyCharm is not the only editor with a notebook strategy. Many competitors are embracing notebooks. A serious challenger seems to emerge; Visual Studio Code, with convincing arguments: open source code, free, with a good momentum and a rapidly growing user base.

Editing Jupyter notebooks in an IDE can in principle provide multiple benefits:

• Editing notebooks can become simpler. Can we copy, paste or merge multiple notebooks as easily as we can with scripts?
• Can we navigate in the code and benefit from interactive suggestions (documentation, completion, checks…)?
• Can we debug, set breakpoints and watch notebook variables?
• Can we use a single editor to edit and maintain all our documents?

Is editing your notebooks in an editor viable today? Marc Wouts, author of Jupytext and researcher at CFM has written an article sharing how he has been able to work with notebooks inside IDEs. He provides a benchmark of PyCharm vs. VS Code that should be of interest to anybody who wants to be more productive with Jupyter notebooks.

CFM is an asset manager using science and technology to develop quantitative and systematic investment strategies, and is thus a heavy user of Python (for data manipulation and analysis, production, etc.) and of Jupyter notebooks (for interactive research). Therefore Marc draws his experience from real life applications, which makes his article all the more relevant.

You can find the main article on the Towards Data Science blog or on GitHub.