VSCode: port or alternative

[asiloisad]

Hi,
in last days the Atom software look like nearly dead. The hydrogen package is one of the most important packages for my everyday work and now I'm looking for something similar in VSCode.

Have you seen any similar package to Hydrogen in VSCode or are there any plans to port the package? The .ipynb workflow is good, but not nearly good as idea od Hydrogen.

Best regards

[pintergreg]

It's now officially dead: https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/

[oiao]

I second this. A lot of people seem to, looking at #449. I'm not quite clear on why this has not been ported a long time ago. Is VSCode incompatible with such a functionality?

Hydrogen has been the only thing keeping me from switching to a different editor, but with the recent news it seems like there is no way around that. Would be great to have Hydrogen in VSCode.

[asiloisad]

at first the bubbles results was impossible to implement in vscode, but 2-3 years ago the posibillity was added. just check https://www.julia-vscode.org/ and see it is possible.

[matthewgdv]

Agreed, a port to either VSCode or Pycharm would be amazing. My department relies on Hydrogen's interactive workflows pretty extensively and having to go back to traditional jupyter notebooks will seriously suck :(

[aminya]

There's nteract itself, which was directly inspired by Hydrogen.
https://nteract.io/

VsCode's Jupyter integration comes close if that works for you.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/datascience/jupyter-notebooks

You can export ipynb from Hydrogen and migrate to nteract or VsCode.

However, I agree that using a new file extension (ipynb) just to get some interactive features is not the best method. These files are not good for writing libraries. They are hard to reuse and distribute and sometimes lack reproducibility.

[okenakt]

Atom+Hydrogen is still a powerfull and no alternative development tool.
The flexibility to change execution blocks by selection without cell definitions like jupyter, and coding as a pure python script with inline debugging is great interactive experience.
No longer possible to handle high-dimensional arrays or huge datatables without Hydrogen.

[contang0]

VsCode's Jupyter integration comes close if that works for you. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/datascience/jupyter-notebooks

Sorry to be nitpicky, but it really doesn't. What Microsoft did with that addon is one big load of nonsense. The very concept of adding some weird characters to the code in order to turn it into a "cell" that can then be run is just stupid beyond belief.

[ttxtea]

I am not sure how nteract notebooks work, but I think they are normal json format and not as in hydrogen, normal python code plus comments.

The json way as severe downsides

• hard to read and fix in a normal fall back editor like vim
• therefore not suitable for normal git repos, where you would like to merege and fix files by hand
• you cant just run it with python as a script

all of these issues are perfectly handeled by atom+hydrogen. Visualstudio notebooks dont do any of that.

I would be wonderful to find a way to continue hydrogen in some way. Either as part of a striped and simplified atom fork that is sustainable by a community. Or by some new editor that is simply a hydrogen frontend. But I don't have much hope. Its back to VIM for me.

[asiloisad]

Has anyone heard of a good alternative? has there been anything noteworthy recently? as many people mentioned above, jupyter and .ipynb is not a solution. I'm also aware of the developing Pulsar, but it has a lot of problems with hydrogen support.

[ttxtea]

Pulsar is a very active atom community fork. Packages like hydrogen can be installed. I did have some problems, but I heard of people where it seems to work just like in good old atom.

[chriskuchar]

This is the very reason why I love open source, rather than software as a service. Atom gets sunsetted, and people who care about atom and atom + hydrogen just fork a new one. You guys at Pulsar are amazing.

[contang0]

Agreed. Isn't it amazing that with all the development effort Microsoft spends on their VS Code Python extension it's still so vastly inferior to Atom+Hydrogen? I filled out their surveys countless of times pointing to its deficiencies, nothing ever improved, and probably never will.