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tkf / emacs-ipython-notebook

IPython notebook client in Emacs
tkf.github.com/emacs-ipython-notebook/
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Connecting directly to an IPython kernel? #148

Open tompx opened 10 years ago

tompx commented 10 years ago

Hi,

First of all, EIN looks awesome!

I was wondering about one of the design decisions on this project. It appears that this notebook frontend connects to the IPython notebook server, and I'm wondering about the possibility of connecting directly to the IPython kernel instead. This is useful for two reasons:

  1. There are some situations where it's possible to start a kernel but difficult to start a notebook server, for example when you using IPython.embed_kernel to embed a kernel in a larger Python application.
  2. People have written other IPython kernels for other languages, such as IHaskell (https://github.com/gibiansky/IHaskell), and it would be nice to connect EIN to these kernels directly instead of going through a notebook server.

So my questions are as follows:

  1. What do you gain by connecting to the notebook server instead of the kernel? (I'm guessing management and saving of different notebooks for one thing...)
  2. How much work would it be to allow EIN to connect directly to a kernel, much as the qtconsole frontend does?
  3. If 2. is reasonably feasible, how might I contribute to working on it? :)

Thanks, Tom

tommclaughlin commented 10 years ago

@tkf , any chance I could get an answer on this?