The world's shortest tidbit

I don't think this is really worthwhile as a tidbit, as it's (1) very short, and (2) very obvious - once you know about it.

But this is a productivity lifehack that makes it much easier to use Python for data science, through both VSCode and PyCharm, kind of how easy R is to use via RStudio.

The tidbit is:

If you break up the code in your .py script with comments of the format #%% this will get both VSCode and PyCharm to recognise the code below them, until the next #%%, as a code cell (what R calls a "code chunk").

This has the benefits:

• You can execute code cell-by-cell (and not just line by line) using keyboard shortcuts. For example, in the image below, I used shift-Return to execute all of the imports at once.
• When live-debugging and working on your code you can get a jupyter-notebook-like interface (aka console, for the R users) on the right, where you can type extra commands that you want to use to develop and prototype your code as you go along.
• Because your actual code is stored in a .py file, it is nicely amenable to version control with git - making it like Rmd files in this regard. Conversely, jupyter notebook output is also stored with the notebook, so can look like a binary mess with git - although GitHub does try to ameliorate this problem somewhat.

So there really are heaps of benefits - and no drawbacks I've been able to see - for using # %% in your Python code.