Funny, sitting in the drive through today, my mind wandered to what it'd take to reimplement python.el in terms of an IPython back-end process. While I'm not terribly interested in notebook support per se, I'd love to be able to run OS X Emacs.app against multiple IPython "REPL servers" running on OS X, FreeBSD, and Windows. This project might be a good place to start.
Speaking of Windows, anyone out there have recent status on any efforts to port IPython to IronPython? IIRC removing CPython implementation dependencies was explicitly mentioned in the general design goals for the 0.1x refactoring, but I couldn't find anything beyond this when I looked into it a few months ago. I ask because it's actually a project I've seriously considered picking up myself if it's not nearing completion elsewhere.
You can connect to REPLs over ssh using `ipython console`. Even without EIN, you can use this command (plus several options for ssh connection) for python-mode's interactive shell. With EIN I think it's a little bit easier (if you are using python.el), as it helps you to setup these options.
re IronPython/IPython: it's on the list of things i'd like to fund the IPython team to do, though there have been bigger fish to fry during the past year... most recently getting IPython on to Windows Azure & Visual Studio. It shouldn't be too hard given the recent rearchitecture. <disc: me @ msft>
Display graphics in Vim? A REPL within Vim? This is precisely the main advantage of Emacs over Vim: Connecting to external processes and doing more than just text editing.
(Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that Vim is bad. But this kind of thing just does not fit its mission statement)
True, REPLs are possible in Vim. Terminals are possible, too. It's not that anything is impossible (it's software, right? So anything is possible), but how easy it is.
Emacs was built for that. Vim was not. Which by the way does not say anything good or bad about either of them. But I would dare say that Vim is most commonly used alongside a terminal, whereas Emacs users tend to run terminals inside Emacs. Hence your normal workflow would be to run iPython alongside Vim or within Emacs.
I've never tried, but VIM already got nice looking IPython binding (https://github.com/ivanov/vim-ipython). I think it doesn't support notebook editing though.
Speaking of Windows, anyone out there have recent status on any efforts to port IPython to IronPython? IIRC removing CPython implementation dependencies was explicitly mentioned in the general design goals for the 0.1x refactoring, but I couldn't find anything beyond this when I looked into it a few months ago. I ask because it's actually a project I've seriously considered picking up myself if it's not nearing completion elsewhere.