Yours is a good question, and I can't really provide a good answer. Firstly, I suppose I wish for something more akin to an IDE with a proper list of variables,

Yours is a good question, and I can't really provide a good answer. Firstly, I suppose I wish for something more akin to an IDE with a proper list of variables, functions, classes, & cetera; tabs; and as the screenshots of this JupyterLab beta release show, a capability for displaying different data types in different self-contained windows that are not in-lines to the notebook document. I probably expressed myself very poorly.