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Show HN: Scripton – Python IDE with built-in realtime visualizations

449 points by nightcraft 2y ago

Hey HN, Scripton (https://scripton.dev https://scripton.dev) is a Python IDE built for fast, interactive visualizations and exploratory programming — without the constraints of notebooks. Why another Python IDE? Scripton hopes to fill a gap in the Python development ecosystem by being an IDE that: 1. Focuses on easy, fast, and interactive visualizations (and exposes rich JS plotting libraries like Observable Plot and Plotly directly to Python) 2. Provides a tightly integrated REPL for rapid prototyping and exploration 3. Is script-centric (as opposed to, say, notebook-style) A historical detour for why these 3 features: Not so long ago (ok, well, maybe over a decade ago...), the go-to environment for many researchers in scientific fields would have been something like MATLAB. Generating multiple simultaneous visualizations (potentially dynamic) directly from your scripts, rapidly prototyping in the REPL, all without giving up on writing regular scripts. Over time, many switched over to Python but there wasn't an equivalent environment offering similar capabilities. IPython/Jupyter notebooks eventually became the de facto replacement. And while notebooks are great for many things (indeed, it wasn't uncommon for folks to switch between MATLAB and Mathematica Notebooks), they do make certain trade-offs that prevent them from being a full substitute. Inner workings: - Implemented in C++ (IDE <-> Python IPC), Python, TypeScript (UI), WGSL (WebGPU-based visualizations) - While the editor component is based off Monaco, the IDE is not a vscode fork and was written from scratch. Happy to chat about the trade-offs if anyone's interested - Uses a custom Python debugger written from scratch (which enables features like visualizing intermediate outputs while paused in the debugger) Scripton's under active development (currently only available for macOS but Linux and Windows support is planned). Would love for you to try it out and share your thoughts! Since this is HN, I’m also happy to chat about its internals.

InDubioProRubio 2y ago
Kinde of like https://r-graph-gallery.com/ https://r-graph-gallery.com/ of rstudio?
somesun 2y ago
is this a AI editor like Cursor?
giancarlostoro 2y ago
This looks beautiful, I don't do data viz in Python so I don't have a use for this. I do mostly web dev in Python, but wow it looks amazing! I'm really surprised (and almost not) to hear the UI is in TypeScript, did you use a specific web framework like React by chance? The UI looks really nice to me.
- nightcraft 2y ago
  Thanks! The initial prototype did use React, but the overhead in certain cases soon became an issue. It got replaced by a custom virtual dom implementation (coincidentally quite similar to Atom's Etch), but debugging complex updates remained an issue. Eventually, it ended up in a place quite similar to vscode: no frameworks and a handful of "core components" (eg: a virtualized list view)
Woshiwuja 2y ago
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KeplerBoy 2y ago
Can it visualize PyTorch Tensors without an additional memory copy? I.e. mapping it directly to a texture which is then displayed? I know this is not much of a concern on a system with unified memory (all recent apple computers).
- nightcraft 2y ago
  Not yet. Some internal prototypes did try using IOSurfaces on macOS to go with the zero copy route, but there were a fair number of limitations. That said, the IPC minimizes copies and is actually fairly efficient at handling large numerical arrays.
andsoitis 2y ago
Do you plan on selling copies (vs only subscription)?
- nightcraft 2y ago
  The plan for now is just subscriptions. However, I would like to eventually have something like Jetbrains' "perpetual fallback license" where you can keep using up to a particular version after, say, a year of subscription.
ayhanfuat 2y ago
How does Observable Plot work here? Do you translate the code to JavaScript?
- nightcraft 2y ago
  The scripton Python library internally transforms many common Python data formats (regular arrays and dicts, numpy arrays, data frames, ...) to an intermediate format. These are transferred to the IDE when you call the plotting functions, and then auto-translated into the JS equivalent. Your Python plotting code ends up looking like this: https://docs.scripton.dev/api/plot/orion/overview https://docs.scripton.dev/api/plot/orion/overview
paddy_m 2y ago
What are your plans for a data table UI? Shameless plug: I created the open source Buckaroo table for jupyter (embeddable in other contexts) with histograms, summary stats, search... I love talking tables if you want to get in touch.
- nightcraft 2y ago
  Coincidentally, one of the first components I wrote for Scripton was a virtualized table for handling million+ row dataframes with Tufte-esque inline visualizations (in a much evolved form, it currently backs the REPL). The data table got deferred to focus on the visualization bits for the initial release, but it's definitely planned!
  - paddy_m 2y ago
    Did you write your own table? Million+ row handling is nice. Once I figured out window based display of tables, documentation and a bunch of other pieces of architecture became simpler. Previously I sent the whole dataset or a sample of it. -- Is Scripton user extendable? Do you expect ipywidgets/anywidgets based projects to plug in?
    - nightcraft 2y ago
      Yup, it was written from scratch. Yeah, having a flexible virtualized table certainly makes it easier to build more complex things on top (a lesson I initially learned from NSTableView/UITableView). Currently, it's not user extendable. While it does support some IPython features (eg: Python classes that implement IPython's rich outputs also work in Scripton), ipywidgets are currently not supported.
matt1285 2y ago
more like SubScripton
pzo 2y ago
Looks beautiful so congratulation for the launch. Not sure if today this is enough though without any kind of AI chat assistant. Trae [0] is based on VSCode and Jetbrains Fleet are good looking as well. Visualization is definitely a big plus but there is also alternative like using rerun [1] and dearpygui [2] or some VSCode plugins (Python Image Preview, AREPL for Python)- might be hard to compete with those free alternatives on a subscription model IMHO but good luck! [0] https://trae.ai/ https://trae.ai/ [1] https://www.rerun.io/ https://www.rerun.io/ [2] https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui
- nightcraft 2y ago
  Thanks! GitHub Copilot support is actively under development.
  - DrBenCarson 2y ago
    You should look into Roo and offer subscribers some # of OpenRouter credits in exchange for subscribing
- deleted 2y ago
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erichocean 2y ago
If you want this in Clojure, check out Clerk. [0] As a bonus, you can continue to use whatever IDE you already use. [0] https://github.com/nextjournal/clerk https://github.com/nextjournal/clerk
- upghost 2y ago
  well, I didn't know I could use clerk with my IDE. Thanks for pointing that out!
roger_ 2y ago
This looks incredible, but I’m not a fan of the subscription pricing. How about a hobbyist rate at least?
kaboomshebang 2y ago
What happens when I would stop my subscription? The scripton lib is open source and the lyra orion plot functions can output image files without refactoring? (Or do I have to reactivate my subscription?) (Congrats on your product launch btw :)
whalesalad 2y ago
Does anyone know the name of the typeface/font used in the example images?
- sangeeth96 2y ago
  Looks like JetBrains Mono.
  - whalesalad 2y ago
    I think that you are right, thanks!
ckastner 2y ago
In a similar vein: https://www.spyder-ide.org/ https://www.spyder-ide.org/ (MIT-licensed)
- 999900000999 2y ago
  Thanks for sharing. The OP posted a cool project, but 20$ a month for a nice VS code fork is absurd. Plus it's Mac only now.
  - _blk 2y ago
    Why is 20$/month absurd for something that boosts productivity? What does matlab coat nowadays? Sounds like he'd like to be able to improve it further and clients invest in that. Absurd is people paying 80$+/month for yt tv so they can watch ads.. My opinions.
    - sneilan1 2y ago
      I don't want to pay $20/month for something that is probably going to be mostly unchanged after I purchase. That's like paying rent for tooling. I want to own my tools not rent them.
      - vunderba 2y ago
        Agreed. The visualizations are very nice. I'd consider purchasing a copy for $150-$200 if it would give me one year of free updates, but I simply don't do subscription models without any kind of fallback license anymore. I really dislike the idea of justifying eternal subscription cost models because of "ROI". Every tool has an ROI, but you don't see photographers paying a monthly fee to use their camera, you don't see electricians paying a monthly fee to use their oscilloscope, you don't see carpenters paying a monthly fee to use their table saw, etc. And this isn't Kickstarter - I'm not interested in investing in features/upgrades that the application might get at some point in the future, I buy software based on the feature set that it currently has.
    - the__alchemist 2y ago
MattDaEskimo 2y ago
I would've enjoyed trying this out but the subscription fee is an immediate turn off. My biggest concern with this project is expertise and potential burn-out. There's a lot of writing from scratch that really begs to go through the gauntlet of open source.
- keyle 2y ago
  Same for me, I would prefer a one off fee, or a subset of features for free. I like owning my tools though.
- deleted 2y ago
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zipy124 2y ago
Fantastic product and props to the creator on it! Though Mac only and a subscription price of this magnitude for an IDE is a hard sell, given the availability of other options, which aren't neccesarily $20 a month worse. Never the less I'll keep my eye on this project.
garyfirestorm 2y ago
why not go down vscode extension path?
- nightcraft 2y ago
  The vscode extensions path, unfortunately, would have been too restrictive for many of Scripton's features/technical requirements (tightly coupled REPL, minimal IPC overhead, ...)
  - bangaladore 2y ago
    This is very frequently mentioned by people when they decide to fork vscode / build their own editor. Its not a huge deal here (in theory) as this is a python IDE. One of the biggest issues I've seen with other editor forks / whatever is some first party Microsoft extensions (dotnet iirc, cpp) will not function outside Microsoft's vscode release. Does your editor support vsix extensions? I assume no as you are just using monoco. Again, could be a dealbreaker for many.
the__alchemist 2y ago
The price doesn't make sense in conjunction with PyCharm's pricing IMO.
- deleted 2y ago
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CyberDildonics 2y ago
Congratulations on your advertisement. I personally won't be paying to have free and open source software rented back to me as a monthly subscription, but I wish you the best of luck.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  Freedom, not beer.
Maelcum 2y ago
As far as I'm concerned, the subscription model is an instant showstopper, just like web-based UIs.
screye 2y ago
OP, you're selling your tool to the wrong people. HN is not the crowd. This is for core-engineers who want to get value out of coding. Find people who pay the $1000/yr to use 1 tool in Matlab, and start pulling them away.
- lolinder 2y ago
  There are plenty of that type of person here on HN, we're not all engineers.
  - KeplerBoy 2y ago
    i.e. some of us are engineers in the traditional meaning.
    - zwieback 2y ago
      I wonder how many "traditional" engineers are Mac coders. I work at hp so not many Macs around but in our R&D and especially in manufacturing and test&measurement Mac-only would be a problem.
- keyle 2y ago
  Please don't try and box the user base of a web community. It's exclusive rather than inclusive. You have no idea who is reading these pages.
  - screye 2y ago
    It is less so OP's tool, and more so the way they presented it. I won't discourage them away from SWEs. Instead, I want to encourage them to sell to core engineers. I was a MechE for the longest time too. And this is a great Matlab alternative. In fact, I was exactly that MechE who was using HN to feel like a part of the tech community. The top post is phrased as a sell. But, if I'd read it during my MechE days then it would've gone right over my head.
- deleted 2y ago
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alsodumb 2y ago
I am a robotics engineer/scientist and I do shit ton of visualization of all kind of high-fidelity/high-rate data, often in a streaming setting - time series at a few thousand Hz, RGB/depth images from multiple cameras, debugging my models by visualizing many layer outputs, every augmentation, etc. For a long time, I had my own observability suite - a messy library of python scripts that I use for visualizing data. I replaced all of them with rerun (https://rerun.io/ https://rerun.io/) and if you are someone who think Scipton is exciting, you should def try rerun too! I use cursor/vscode for my development and add a line or two to my usual workflows in python, and rerun pops up in it's own window. It's a simple pip installable library, and just works. It's open source, and the founders run a very active forum too. Edit: One slightly related tid-bit that might be interesting to HN folks. rerun isn't that old, and is in active development, with some breaking changes and new features that come up every month. And it means that LLM are pretty bad at rerun code gen, beyond the simple boilerplate. Recently, it kind of made my life hell as all of my interns refuse to use docs and try using LLMs for rerun code generation and come to me with a messy code spaghetti. It's both sad and hilarious. To make my life easier, I asked rerun folks to create and host machine readable docs somewhere and they never got to it. So I just scrape their docs into a markdown file and ask my interns to paste the docs in their prompt before they query LLMs and it works like a charm now.
- rcpt 2y ago
  For magnet levitation project I am dumping data to a csv on a rpi and then reading it over ssh onto matplotlib on my desktop. It works but it choppy. Probably because of the ssh. Could I drop rerun into this to improve my monitoring? https://youtube.com/shorts/Y1LGSMFisDc https://youtube.com/shorts/Y1LGSMFisDc
  - alsodumb 2y ago
    Yes! Rerun can definitely make your life a lot easier! Rerun natively supports the server and the viewer being on different devices (https://rerun.io/docs/reference/sdk/operating-modes https://rerun.io/docs/reference/sdk/operating-modes). In your case, in the script you are dumping data into csv, I'd add the relevant lines to log data to rerun. On the desktop side, you can spawn a viewer that can listen to the stream and visualize it.
helboi4 2y ago
This looks really really cool but I do hate everything being subscriptions. Everyone trying to be a digital landlord out here. Just sell me something.
resters 2y ago
this is very cool!
nickserv 2y ago
I've been doing Python development for a long time, since when 2.4 was the hottest thing. I've used the language for all sorts of things: web apps, web APIs, GUI tools, image manipulation, data processing and visualization, some data science, machine learning more recently. I've used many IDEs over the years, currently on PyCharm. Just to qualify the feedback. Pros: - It looks very pretty. - Some nice time saving features. Cons: - Mac only. - Subscription business model. - Having to tie the code to the IDE. Any one of the con's would be a deal breaker for me. Overall I'm not sure what the target market is. Maybe I'm just too used to having free and/or libre tooling.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > currently on PyCharm. ... Cons: Subscription business model. ... Any one of the con's would be a deal breaker for me. I'm curious to understand this better (as a fan of JetBrains): do you currently use PyCharm Community or does the JetBrains model not count as a subscription for you?
  - vunderba 2y ago
    Chiming in here, Jetbrains is a subscription model, but with a very important qualifier in the form of a perpetual fallback license once you stop paying. It's an important distinction, and I wish more businesses would follow this model.
    - markus_zhang 2y ago
      Is the Jetbrain model basically the pricing model of early era (pre 2000s) IDEs? I remember back then developers had to pay for editors and compilers, which usually came with a huge amount of manuals. And then they could install patches until a new major version rolled out. I'm actually OK with that model, if they still ship manuals in paper.
      - vunderba 2y ago
        Yeah, I think it's pretty similar. I definitely remember purchasing copies of the software like Borland C++ / Visual Studio / etc. that would essentially cover the major version number and all patch related updates. Although personally, I don't know if jetbrains offers an actual physical copy (give me back the big box!).
mft_ 2y ago
Oh, this looks really grea... oh, it's another $20/m subscription...
markus_zhang 2y ago
I wonder who are the target users. I do use a lot of Python but never had the need to plot outside of Notebooks. I guess anyone who plots a lot in Python? Maybe electronics engineers?
for_i_in_range 2y ago
This reminds me of Light Table from a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3836978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3836978
menelaus 2y ago
make it a neovim plugin and I'll bite!
BiteCode_dev 2y ago
I like the idea, but it should be a separate product, not an IDE. Make it a Python runner with a visualization tool and independent from an IDE. You will not have to catch up with the big IDEs, no need to maintain the IDE code, you get people using different IDEs to adopt your products and they can keep their tooling.
hakube 2y ago
Why is everything a subscription? This world is going nuts!
- zwieback 2y ago
  wait a while and there will also be advertising every time you boot up and at random other times
- nomel 2y ago
  Developers enjoy sustained income, and "worth", at least in a professional context (which tool developer who enjoy money will target), is much more about value/time.
- deleted 2y ago
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hoistbypetard 2y ago
This looks very nice. Good job shipping it! For me personally, though, it's a hard sell. Since I just paid my JetBrains renewal, I am currently very aware that I'm paying $173/year for *all* of their IDEs, and PyCharm Pro is very good. Just from looking through the site for this one, while it does some *SUPER* nice things, it doesn't replace everything I use from just PyCharm Pro, let alone from the other JetBrains tools that I also use and get in that subscription. So it costs more than my current subscription, and wouldn't let me replace it even if the Linux version suddenly shipped today. I love the competition in this space and wish you good luck. But, as someone who's obviously willing to pay for tools in this space, the only ways I could suggest that you could get my business would be: 1. Grow your feature set to the point that I could replace my JetBrains subscription with yours. 2. Become a JetBrains add-on, and reduce your price to something less than $10/mo. Both of those look like tough roads... I hope you succeed wildly, even so.
- nightcraft 2y ago
  Thanks, appreciate the feedback! While the initial focus is on visualization capabilities, the missing IDE features are actively under development. Beyond cross-platform support, which PyCharm features would you consider essential and would like to see the most?
  - hoistbypetard 2y ago
    It's a long list. Most prominent lately, for me: * uv/poetry detection and environment use * refactoring * unittest/pytest support * docker compose service support (e.g. if I have a docker-compose.yml file in my project directory with redis and postgres services, pycharm lists the services in a UI and lets me start/stop/restart them easily from the IDE.) * django app/model detection and completion from those models as I'm building things that query them * "compound" runners, so I can start a npm watcher and a python watcher at the same time, and bounce them together as I iterate * The debugger is really, really good. And it's practically automatic to jump from the PyCharm debugger to the Clion debugger when I'm dealing with a python package that has C++ modules. * django and jinja template support as I build out things that present my results. * ability to connect it to a data source and query/explore using sql directly against that, and see tabular results to help guide my other explorations * Vim emulation in the editor... IdeaVim is a really good vim implementation, and I find I hate working without vim movements and commands.
decide1000 2y ago
It looks nice but I like my Jetbrains. Why not integrate it? Also Mac only doesn't make sense for me. I use linux only.
deleted 2y ago
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loic-sharma 2y ago
> While the editor component is based off Monaco, the IDE is not a vscode fork and was written from scratch. Interesting! What are the trade-offs here?
- nightcraft 2y ago
  IMO, VSCode's codebase is excellent and quite well designed with most functionality abstracted out into injectable services. However, the interaction of these services and other bits of architecture do impose certain limitations that are tricky to workaround. One option is to fork vscode, write your own services, alter the architecture as necessary. You're then faced with keeping this in sync with the rapidly changing upstream code. Another alternative is to implement it as an extension, but that has a fair number of restrictions. For certain projects, forking/extending may be the right call. However, for the degree of customization required for Scripton, writing from scratch turned out to be the more viable path (vs attempting to workaround/rewrite yet another component in vscode). The trade off here, of course, is that you lose out on the familiarity and ecosystem that VSCode has built over nearly a decade. The hope is that Scripton remains sufficiently familiar (eg: Search / CMD+P / etc work similar to vscode) while being compelling enough in its own right.
ei625 2y ago
20$ is cheap for people actually need, it might be better to sell to manager levels while explaining ROI.
dinkblam 2y ago
Hold Command-Q to quit? Please don't do that! Shortcuts are meant to be pressed and not meant to be held for a second...
- nightcraft 2y ago
  Some folks do like hold-to-quit to avoid accidentally quitting (similar to Chrome's default behavior). However, point taken - it'll be configurable in the next update.
kali_00 2y ago
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randomcatuser 2y ago
whoa this is so cool!! Can you tell us a bit more about the C++ part? I don't get it
- nightcraft 2y ago
  Thanks! The C++ bit comes in for the IPC (inter-process communication) between the IDE and Python. There are a few different ways for the Python process to communicate (send data over for visualization, receive/transmit commands, etc) with the IDE. For instance, you could communicate over HTTP. Depending on the use case, that can have an appreciable performance overhead. Instead, Scripton uses a lower-level mechanism with a protocol optimized for sending binary payloads (eg: large numpy arrays, images, etc). This communication and processing is implemented in C++ as a native multithreaded node module. It effectively enables very low latency and high throughput visualizations.
levocardia 2y ago
But does it have a variable explorer? Somehow this simple feature, available in MATLAB and RStudio, is sorely lacking in many Python IDEs. I put up with an unbelievable amount of crap in Spyder because I can actually inspect dataframes, matrices, etc.
- alsodumb 2y ago
  Vanilla vscode has some version of this in the debugging mode, you'd perhaps need to install their Python extensions but that's about it.
- nightcraft 2y ago
  It does show you the active variables (and bits of details like shapes and dtypes for numpy arrays, torch tensors, dataframes, etc): https://scripton.dev/assets/images/lib-symbols@2x.png https://scripton.dev/assets/images/lib-symbols@2x.png However, I'm assuming you want to drill down further into these (and have them displayed as a table for instance)? While the current version doesn't have that, it's definitely planned.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  PyCharm does this well
daft_pink 2y ago
I find a lot of my pain points with python have to do with deployment. I’m going to try and study webassembly this year in the hopes that it will make it easier to deploy code without a server to an non-programmer end user.
zxie 2y ago
Very sleek UI. Don't mind the subscription pricing -- keeps all parties aligned. The UI toolkit is especially exciting, been looking for something to replace streamlit.
- nightcraft 2y ago
  Thanks!
merillecuz56 2y ago
[flagged]
gcanyon 2y ago
This looks really nice! I currently use LiveCode (which isn't Python-based) for my daily "I have a bunch of data I'm looking to filter/transform/clean up" tasks. I'm always on the lookout for a similar tool, which for me means: 1. Text inputs (table/spreadsheet inputs?) 2. Text outputs 3. Buttons 4. Menus 5. Sliders 6. Checkboxes/radio buttons And bonus points for: 7. bundle it up and give it to someone else to run I think out of that list you have 2, 3, and 5? https://docs.scripton.dev/api/interact/user-interfaces/widgets https://docs.scripton.dev/api/interact/user-interfaces/widge... Any chance you'll push further into the build-a-UI-to-muck-with-data realm?
- nightcraft 2y ago
  Thanks! That's correct: 2, 3, and 5 are currently available. This initial set was intended as a minimal (albeit limited) set that demonstrates the UI capabilities. More widgets/controls (including the ones you've mentioned) are definitely coming. 7 is something I've considered (along the lines of a redistributable "Scripton runtime" that packages up the scripts and bundles a portable Python distribution). However, that's currently much further down on the todo list.
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    That is exciting news. I will check out Scripton in greater depth, and with the right set of interface widgets I would be in the heart of your target market.
hackermanai 2y ago
This looks very nice! How long have you been working on this? I will be releasing hackerman.ai text editor later this year (or ASAP), also somewhat niche product with support for creating/editing lexers (eg for your own languages), able to customize almost everything, set key bindings to use self-defined functions (scripting), and ofc integrated AI features, which can also be customized and added as commands etc. Built on top of Qt framework.
gogasca 2y ago
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peme969 2y ago
cool project :)
man4 2y ago
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Sweepi 2y ago
My personal wish: Linux version, please. My advice: Get the [planned] Windows version to shipping asap. Best of luck :)
croemer 2y ago
> And while notebooks are great for many things, they do make certain trade-offs that prevent them from being a full substitute. Please elaborate on this. What are the tradeoffs? I use VSCode and just add a magic comment #%% to split my Python script into cells and then I can run them as a notebook cell.
dcreater 2y ago
Looks cool. A subscription to use it? Hard pass.

449 points by nightcraft 2y ago

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

Kinde of like https://r-graph-gallery.com/ https://r-graph-gallery.com/ of rstudio?

somesun 2y ago

is this a AI editor like Cursor?

giancarlostoro 2y ago

This looks beautiful, I don't do data viz in Python so I don't have a use for this. I do mostly web dev in Python, but wow it looks amazing! I'm really surprised (and almost not) to hear the UI is in TypeScript, did you use a specific web framework like React by chance? The UI looks really nice to me.

nightcraft 2y ago
Thanks! The initial prototype did use React, but the overhead in certain cases soon became an issue. It got replaced by a custom virtual dom implementation (coincidentally quite similar to Atom's Etch), but debugging complex updates remained an issue. Eventually, it ended up in a place quite similar to vscode: no frameworks and a handful of "core components" (eg: a virtualized list view)

Woshiwuja 2y ago

[dead]

KeplerBoy 2y ago

Can it visualize PyTorch Tensors without an additional memory copy? I.e. mapping it directly to a texture which is then displayed? I know this is not much of a concern on a system with unified memory (all recent apple computers).

nightcraft 2y ago
Not yet. Some internal prototypes did try using IOSurfaces on macOS to go with the zero copy route, but there were a fair number of limitations. That said, the IPC minimizes copies and is actually fairly efficient at handling large numerical arrays.

andsoitis 2y ago

Do you plan on selling copies (vs only subscription)?

nightcraft 2y ago
The plan for now is just subscriptions. However, I would like to eventually have something like Jetbrains' "perpetual fallback license" where you can keep using up to a particular version after, say, a year of subscription.

ayhanfuat 2y ago

How does Observable Plot work here? Do you translate the code to JavaScript?

nightcraft 2y ago
The scripton Python library internally transforms many common Python data formats (regular arrays and dicts, numpy arrays, data frames, ...) to an intermediate format. These are transferred to the IDE when you call the plotting functions, and then auto-translated into the JS equivalent. Your Python plotting code ends up looking like this: https://docs.scripton.dev/api/plot/orion/overview https://docs.scripton.dev/api/plot/orion/overview

paddy_m 2y ago

What are your plans for a data table UI? Shameless plug: I created the open source Buckaroo table for jupyter (embeddable in other contexts) with histograms, summary stats, search... I love talking tables if you want to get in touch.

nightcraft 2y ago
Coincidentally, one of the first components I wrote for Scripton was a virtualized table for handling million+ row dataframes with Tufte-esque inline visualizations (in a much evolved form, it currently backs the REPL). The data table got deferred to focus on the visualization bits for the initial release, but it's definitely planned!
- paddy_m 2y ago
  Did you write your own table? Million+ row handling is nice. Once I figured out window based display of tables, documentation and a bunch of other pieces of architecture became simpler. Previously I sent the whole dataset or a sample of it. -- Is Scripton user extendable? Do you expect ipywidgets/anywidgets based projects to plug in?
  - nightcraft 2y ago
    Yup, it was written from scratch. Yeah, having a flexible virtualized table certainly makes it easier to build more complex things on top (a lesson I initially learned from NSTableView/UITableView). Currently, it's not user extendable. While it does support some IPython features (eg: Python classes that implement IPython's rich outputs also work in Scripton), ipywidgets are currently not supported.

matt1285 2y ago

more like SubScripton

pzo 2y ago

Looks beautiful so congratulation for the launch. Not sure if today this is enough though without any kind of AI chat assistant. Trae [0] is based on VSCode and Jetbrains Fleet are good looking as well. Visualization is definitely a big plus but there is also alternative like using rerun [1] and dearpygui [2] or some VSCode plugins (Python Image Preview, AREPL for Python)- might be hard to compete with those free alternatives on a subscription model IMHO but good luck! [0] https://trae.ai/ https://trae.ai/ [1] https://www.rerun.io/ https://www.rerun.io/ [2] https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui

nightcraft 2y ago
Thanks! GitHub Copilot support is actively under development.
- DrBenCarson 2y ago
  You should look into Roo and offer subscribers some # of OpenRouter credits in exchange for subscribing
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erichocean 2y ago

If you want this in Clojure, check out Clerk. [0] As a bonus, you can continue to use whatever IDE you already use. [0] https://github.com/nextjournal/clerk https://github.com/nextjournal/clerk

upghost 2y ago
well, I didn't know I could use clerk with my IDE. Thanks for pointing that out!

roger_ 2y ago

This looks incredible, but I’m not a fan of the subscription pricing. How about a hobbyist rate at least?

kaboomshebang 2y ago

What happens when I would stop my subscription? The scripton lib is open source and the lyra orion plot functions can output image files without refactoring? (Or do I have to reactivate my subscription?) (Congrats on your product launch btw :)

whalesalad 2y ago

Does anyone know the name of the typeface/font used in the example images?

sangeeth96 2y ago
Looks like JetBrains Mono.
- whalesalad 2y ago
  I think that you are right, thanks!

ckastner 2y ago

In a similar vein: https://www.spyder-ide.org/ https://www.spyder-ide.org/ (MIT-licensed)

999900000999 2y ago
Thanks for sharing. The OP posted a cool project, but 20$ a month for a nice VS code fork is absurd. Plus it's Mac only now.
- _blk 2y ago
  Why is 20$/month absurd for something that boosts productivity? What does matlab coat nowadays? Sounds like he'd like to be able to improve it further and clients invest in that. Absurd is people paying 80$+/month for yt tv so they can watch ads.. My opinions.
  - sneilan1 2y ago
    I don't want to pay $20/month for something that is probably going to be mostly unchanged after I purchase. That's like paying rent for tooling. I want to own my tools not rent them.
    - vunderba 2y ago
      Agreed. The visualizations are very nice. I'd consider purchasing a copy for $150-$200 if it would give me one year of free updates, but I simply don't do subscription models without any kind of fallback license anymore. I really dislike the idea of justifying eternal subscription cost models because of "ROI". Every tool has an ROI, but you don't see photographers paying a monthly fee to use their camera, you don't see electricians paying a monthly fee to use their oscilloscope, you don't see carpenters paying a monthly fee to use their table saw, etc. And this isn't Kickstarter - I'm not interested in investing in features/upgrades that the application might get at some point in the future, I buy software based on the feature set that it currently has.
  - the__alchemist 2y ago

MattDaEskimo 2y ago

I would've enjoyed trying this out but the subscription fee is an immediate turn off. My biggest concern with this project is expertise and potential burn-out. There's a lot of writing from scratch that really begs to go through the gauntlet of open source.

keyle 2y ago
Same for me, I would prefer a one off fee, or a subset of features for free. I like owning my tools though.
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zipy124 2y ago

Fantastic product and props to the creator on it! Though Mac only and a subscription price of this magnitude for an IDE is a hard sell, given the availability of other options, which aren't neccesarily $20 a month worse. Never the less I'll keep my eye on this project.

garyfirestorm 2y ago

why not go down vscode extension path?

nightcraft 2y ago
The vscode extensions path, unfortunately, would have been too restrictive for many of Scripton's features/technical requirements (tightly coupled REPL, minimal IPC overhead, ...)
- bangaladore 2y ago
  This is very frequently mentioned by people when they decide to fork vscode / build their own editor. Its not a huge deal here (in theory) as this is a python IDE. One of the biggest issues I've seen with other editor forks / whatever is some first party Microsoft extensions (dotnet iirc, cpp) will not function outside Microsoft's vscode release. Does your editor support vsix extensions? I assume no as you are just using monoco. Again, could be a dealbreaker for many.

the__alchemist 2y ago

The price doesn't make sense in conjunction with PyCharm's pricing IMO.

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CyberDildonics 2y ago

Congratulations on your advertisement. I personally won't be paying to have free and open source software rented back to me as a monthly subscription, but I wish you the best of luck.

mixmastamyk 2y ago
Freedom, not beer.

Maelcum 2y ago

As far as I'm concerned, the subscription model is an instant showstopper, just like web-based UIs.

screye 2y ago

OP, you're selling your tool to the wrong people. HN is not the crowd. This is for core-engineers who want to get value out of coding. Find people who pay the $1000/yr to use 1 tool in Matlab, and start pulling them away.

lolinder 2y ago
There are plenty of that type of person here on HN, we're not all engineers.
- KeplerBoy 2y ago
  i.e. some of us are engineers in the traditional meaning.
  - zwieback 2y ago
    I wonder how many "traditional" engineers are Mac coders. I work at hp so not many Macs around but in our R&D and especially in manufacturing and test&measurement Mac-only would be a problem.
keyle 2y ago
Please don't try and box the user base of a web community. It's exclusive rather than inclusive. You have no idea who is reading these pages.
- screye 2y ago
  It is less so OP's tool, and more so the way they presented it. I won't discourage them away from SWEs. Instead, I want to encourage them to sell to core engineers. I was a MechE for the longest time too. And this is a great Matlab alternative. In fact, I was exactly that MechE who was using HN to feel like a part of the tech community. The top post is phrased as a sell. But, if I'd read it during my MechE days then it would've gone right over my head.
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alsodumb 2y ago

I am a robotics engineer/scientist and I do shit ton of visualization of all kind of high-fidelity/high-rate data, often in a streaming setting - time series at a few thousand Hz, RGB/depth images from multiple cameras, debugging my models by visualizing many layer outputs, every augmentation, etc. For a long time, I had my own observability suite - a messy library of python scripts that I use for visualizing data. I replaced all of them with rerun (https://rerun.io/ https://rerun.io/) and if you are someone who think Scipton is exciting, you should def try rerun too! I use cursor/vscode for my development and add a line or two to my usual workflows in python, and rerun pops up in it's own window. It's a simple pip installable library, and just works. It's open source, and the founders run a very active forum too. Edit: One slightly related tid-bit that might be interesting to HN folks. rerun isn't that old, and is in active development, with some breaking changes and new features that come up every month. And it means that LLM are pretty bad at rerun code gen, beyond the simple boilerplate. Recently, it kind of made my life hell as all of my interns refuse to use docs and try using LLMs for rerun code generation and come to me with a messy code spaghetti. It's both sad and hilarious. To make my life easier, I asked rerun folks to create and host machine readable docs somewhere and they never got to it. So I just scrape their docs into a markdown file and ask my interns to paste the docs in their prompt before they query LLMs and it works like a charm now.

rcpt 2y ago
For magnet levitation project I am dumping data to a csv on a rpi and then reading it over ssh onto matplotlib on my desktop. It works but it choppy. Probably because of the ssh. Could I drop rerun into this to improve my monitoring? https://youtube.com/shorts/Y1LGSMFisDc https://youtube.com/shorts/Y1LGSMFisDc
- alsodumb 2y ago
  Yes! Rerun can definitely make your life a lot easier! Rerun natively supports the server and the viewer being on different devices (https://rerun.io/docs/reference/sdk/operating-modes https://rerun.io/docs/reference/sdk/operating-modes). In your case, in the script you are dumping data into csv, I'd add the relevant lines to log data to rerun. On the desktop side, you can spawn a viewer that can listen to the stream and visualize it.

helboi4 2y ago

This looks really really cool but I do hate everything being subscriptions. Everyone trying to be a digital landlord out here. Just sell me something.

resters 2y ago

this is very cool!

nickserv 2y ago

I've been doing Python development for a long time, since when 2.4 was the hottest thing. I've used the language for all sorts of things: web apps, web APIs, GUI tools, image manipulation, data processing and visualization, some data science, machine learning more recently. I've used many IDEs over the years, currently on PyCharm. Just to qualify the feedback. Pros: - It looks very pretty. - Some nice time saving features. Cons: - Mac only. - Subscription business model. - Having to tie the code to the IDE. Any one of the con's would be a deal breaker for me. Overall I'm not sure what the target market is. Maybe I'm just too used to having free and/or libre tooling.

lolinder 2y ago
> currently on PyCharm. ... Cons: Subscription business model. ... Any one of the con's would be a deal breaker for me. I'm curious to understand this better (as a fan of JetBrains): do you currently use PyCharm Community or does the JetBrains model not count as a subscription for you?
- vunderba 2y ago
  Chiming in here, Jetbrains is a subscription model, but with a very important qualifier in the form of a perpetual fallback license once you stop paying. It's an important distinction, and I wish more businesses would follow this model.
  - markus_zhang 2y ago
    Is the Jetbrain model basically the pricing model of early era (pre 2000s) IDEs? I remember back then developers had to pay for editors and compilers, which usually came with a huge amount of manuals. And then they could install patches until a new major version rolled out. I'm actually OK with that model, if they still ship manuals in paper.
    - vunderba 2y ago
      Yeah, I think it's pretty similar. I definitely remember purchasing copies of the software like Borland C++ / Visual Studio / etc. that would essentially cover the major version number and all patch related updates. Although personally, I don't know if jetbrains offers an actual physical copy (give me back the big box!).

mft_ 2y ago

Oh, this looks really grea... oh, it's another $20/m subscription...

markus_zhang 2y ago

I wonder who are the target users. I do use a lot of Python but never had the need to plot outside of Notebooks. I guess anyone who plots a lot in Python? Maybe electronics engineers?

for_i_in_range 2y ago

This reminds me of Light Table from a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3836978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3836978

menelaus 2y ago

make it a neovim plugin and I'll bite!

BiteCode_dev 2y ago

I like the idea, but it should be a separate product, not an IDE. Make it a Python runner with a visualization tool and independent from an IDE. You will not have to catch up with the big IDEs, no need to maintain the IDE code, you get people using different IDEs to adopt your products and they can keep their tooling.

hakube 2y ago

Why is everything a subscription? This world is going nuts!

zwieback 2y ago
wait a while and there will also be advertising every time you boot up and at random other times
nomel 2y ago
Developers enjoy sustained income, and "worth", at least in a professional context (which tool developer who enjoy money will target), is much more about value/time.
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hoistbypetard 2y ago

This looks very nice. Good job shipping it! For me personally, though, it's a hard sell. Since I just paid my JetBrains renewal, I am currently very aware that I'm paying $173/year for *all* of their IDEs, and PyCharm Pro is very good. Just from looking through the site for this one, while it does some *SUPER* nice things, it doesn't replace everything I use from just PyCharm Pro, let alone from the other JetBrains tools that I also use and get in that subscription. So it costs more than my current subscription, and wouldn't let me replace it even if the Linux version suddenly shipped today. I love the competition in this space and wish you good luck. But, as someone who's obviously willing to pay for tools in this space, the only ways I could suggest that you could get my business would be: 1. Grow your feature set to the point that I could replace my JetBrains subscription with yours. 2. Become a JetBrains add-on, and reduce your price to something less than $10/mo. Both of those look like tough roads... I hope you succeed wildly, even so.

nightcraft 2y ago
Thanks, appreciate the feedback! While the initial focus is on visualization capabilities, the missing IDE features are actively under development. Beyond cross-platform support, which PyCharm features would you consider essential and would like to see the most?
- hoistbypetard 2y ago
  It's a long list. Most prominent lately, for me: * uv/poetry detection and environment use * refactoring * unittest/pytest support * docker compose service support (e.g. if I have a docker-compose.yml file in my project directory with redis and postgres services, pycharm lists the services in a UI and lets me start/stop/restart them easily from the IDE.) * django app/model detection and completion from those models as I'm building things that query them * "compound" runners, so I can start a npm watcher and a python watcher at the same time, and bounce them together as I iterate * The debugger is really, really good. And it's practically automatic to jump from the PyCharm debugger to the Clion debugger when I'm dealing with a python package that has C++ modules. * django and jinja template support as I build out things that present my results. * ability to connect it to a data source and query/explore using sql directly against that, and see tabular results to help guide my other explorations * Vim emulation in the editor... IdeaVim is a really good vim implementation, and I find I hate working without vim movements and commands.

decide1000 2y ago

It looks nice but I like my Jetbrains. Why not integrate it? Also Mac only doesn't make sense for me. I use linux only.

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loic-sharma 2y ago

> While the editor component is based off Monaco, the IDE is not a vscode fork and was written from scratch. Interesting! What are the trade-offs here?

nightcraft 2y ago
IMO, VSCode's codebase is excellent and quite well designed with most functionality abstracted out into injectable services. However, the interaction of these services and other bits of architecture do impose certain limitations that are tricky to workaround. One option is to fork vscode, write your own services, alter the architecture as necessary. You're then faced with keeping this in sync with the rapidly changing upstream code. Another alternative is to implement it as an extension, but that has a fair number of restrictions. For certain projects, forking/extending may be the right call. However, for the degree of customization required for Scripton, writing from scratch turned out to be the more viable path (vs attempting to workaround/rewrite yet another component in vscode). The trade off here, of course, is that you lose out on the familiarity and ecosystem that VSCode has built over nearly a decade. The hope is that Scripton remains sufficiently familiar (eg: Search / CMD+P / etc work similar to vscode) while being compelling enough in its own right.

ei625 2y ago

20$ is cheap for people actually need, it might be better to sell to manager levels while explaining ROI.

dinkblam 2y ago

Hold Command-Q to quit? Please don't do that! Shortcuts are meant to be pressed and not meant to be held for a second...

nightcraft 2y ago
Some folks do like hold-to-quit to avoid accidentally quitting (similar to Chrome's default behavior). However, point taken - it'll be configurable in the next update.

kali_00 2y ago

[dead]

randomcatuser 2y ago

whoa this is so cool!! Can you tell us a bit more about the C++ part? I don't get it

nightcraft 2y ago
Thanks! The C++ bit comes in for the IPC (inter-process communication) between the IDE and Python. There are a few different ways for the Python process to communicate (send data over for visualization, receive/transmit commands, etc) with the IDE. For instance, you could communicate over HTTP. Depending on the use case, that can have an appreciable performance overhead. Instead, Scripton uses a lower-level mechanism with a protocol optimized for sending binary payloads (eg: large numpy arrays, images, etc). This communication and processing is implemented in C++ as a native multithreaded node module. It effectively enables very low latency and high throughput visualizations.

levocardia 2y ago

But does it have a variable explorer? Somehow this simple feature, available in MATLAB and RStudio, is sorely lacking in many Python IDEs. I put up with an unbelievable amount of crap in Spyder because I can actually inspect dataframes, matrices, etc.

alsodumb 2y ago
Vanilla vscode has some version of this in the debugging mode, you'd perhaps need to install their Python extensions but that's about it.
nightcraft 2y ago
It does show you the active variables (and bits of details like shapes and dtypes for numpy arrays, torch tensors, dataframes, etc): https://scripton.dev/assets/images/lib-symbols@2x.png https://scripton.dev/assets/images/lib-symbols@2x.png However, I'm assuming you want to drill down further into these (and have them displayed as a table for instance)? While the current version doesn't have that, it's definitely planned.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
PyCharm does this well

daft_pink 2y ago

I find a lot of my pain points with python have to do with deployment. I’m going to try and study webassembly this year in the hopes that it will make it easier to deploy code without a server to an non-programmer end user.

zxie 2y ago

Very sleek UI. Don't mind the subscription pricing -- keeps all parties aligned. The UI toolkit is especially exciting, been looking for something to replace streamlit.

nightcraft 2y ago
Thanks!

merillecuz56 2y ago

[flagged]

gcanyon 2y ago

This looks really nice! I currently use LiveCode (which isn't Python-based) for my daily "I have a bunch of data I'm looking to filter/transform/clean up" tasks. I'm always on the lookout for a similar tool, which for me means: 1. Text inputs (table/spreadsheet inputs?) 2. Text outputs 3. Buttons 4. Menus 5. Sliders 6. Checkboxes/radio buttons And bonus points for: 7. bundle it up and give it to someone else to run I think out of that list you have 2, 3, and 5? https://docs.scripton.dev/api/interact/user-interfaces/widgets https://docs.scripton.dev/api/interact/user-interfaces/widge... Any chance you'll push further into the build-a-UI-to-muck-with-data realm?

nightcraft 2y ago
Thanks! That's correct: 2, 3, and 5 are currently available. This initial set was intended as a minimal (albeit limited) set that demonstrates the UI capabilities. More widgets/controls (including the ones you've mentioned) are definitely coming. 7 is something I've considered (along the lines of a redistributable "Scripton runtime" that packages up the scripts and bundles a portable Python distribution). However, that's currently much further down on the todo list.
- gcanyon 2y ago
  That is exciting news. I will check out Scripton in greater depth, and with the right set of interface widgets I would be in the heart of your target market.

hackermanai 2y ago

This looks very nice! How long have you been working on this? I will be releasing hackerman.ai text editor later this year (or ASAP), also somewhat niche product with support for creating/editing lexers (eg for your own languages), able to customize almost everything, set key bindings to use self-defined functions (scripting), and ofc integrated AI features, which can also be customized and added as commands etc. Built on top of Qt framework.

gogasca 2y ago

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peme969 2y ago

cool project :)

man4 2y ago

[dead]

Sweepi 2y ago

My personal wish: Linux version, please. My advice: Get the [planned] Windows version to shipping asap. Best of luck :)

croemer 2y ago

> And while notebooks are great for many things, they do make certain trade-offs that prevent them from being a full substitute. Please elaborate on this. What are the tradeoffs? I use VSCode and just add a magic comment #%% to split my Python script into cells and then I can run them as a notebook cell.

dcreater 2y ago

Looks cool. A subscription to use it? Hard pass.