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.
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 :)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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/) 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.
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.
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!
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.
Show HN: Scripton – Python IDE with built-in realtime visualizations
(scripton.dev)441 points by nightcraft 18 February 2025 | 138 comments
Comments
How about a hobbyist rate at least?
Any chance you'll push further into the build-a-UI-to-muck-with-data realm?
As a bonus, you can continue to use whatever IDE you already use.
[0] https://github.com/nextjournal/clerk
I know this is not much of a concern on a system with unified memory (all recent apple computers).
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.
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.
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.
Also Mac only doesn't make sense for me. I use linux only.
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.
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.
Don't mind the subscription pricing -- keeps all parties aligned.
The UI toolkit is especially exciting, been looking for something to replace streamlit.
Interesting! What are the trade-offs here?
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.
My advice: Get the [planned] Windows version to shipping asap. Best of luck :)
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/) 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.
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.
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/
[1] https://www.rerun.io/
[2] https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui
Find people who pay the $1000/yr to use 1 tool in Matlab, and start pulling them away.
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.