My problem with Jupyter is that it doesn't produce good plaintext files, i.e. you can't edit it using your favorite text editor.

There's a vi mode plugin [1] for it which helps me get by.

[1] https://github.com/lambdalisue/jupyter-vim-binding

I'll add that there's an emacs Jupyter mode if that's of any interest.

I agree in principle that a better plaintext format could be interesting, but I don't see how embedding graphs etc could be easily done without a special interface of some kind.

That said I can imagine a mode where you simply have any editor open on one half of the screen and a browser that autorefreshes on the other.. this is more or less how I work with Emacs and Evince when working on Latex and it's great. Synchronising vertical position with the cursor position might be a challenge.

When you're finished, you can use

  jupyter nbconvert --to python

to get your work in script form.

Yeah you can. Atom has hydrogen, there's one in vscode too.