I am curious about the choice of textual representation

[meditans]

First of all, congrats on marimo, it's a very smooth tool, and miles ahead of jupyter, I think mostly for its attention to the text presentation of the notebook (the format on which you save on disk). So, as I was editing a notebook via emacs and the --watch option, I wondered: why do you decide of using that textual format? Specifically, why:

import marimo

__generated_with = "0.11.0"
app = marimo.App()

@app.cell
def _():
  a = 2+3
  print(a)
  return (a,)
  
@app.cell
def _():
  b = 2+3
  print(b)
  return (b,)

instead of something like:

### cell
a = 2+3
print(a)

### cell
b = 2+3
print(b)

If I understand correctly, the static analysis already yields the return values, so why write them in the first place?
Thank you again!

[mscolnick]

With the later, you can get lots of linting/type-checking errors since variables won't necessarily be declared before referenced.
Also, if you import one module from another, you end up executing the whole notebook. Although the functions look like boilerplate, they allow for lazy and partial imports/initialization.

We do support exporting to a flat script in the second format you suggested:

1. via the UI in the top-right notebook dropdown
2. marimo export script nb.py

[meditans]

Very good reasons thank you, especially the importing story. I can see better the tradeoff now. Followup question: is the "flat script" export you are mentioning unidirectional or does it allow roundtrip via --watch? I usually declare variables before using them, and for exploratory notebooks, being able to edit directly the flat representation would be more comfortable.

[dmadisetti]

So there is a markdown format that might better fit your needs:

https://github.com/marimo-team/marimo/blob/main/marimo/_tutorials/markdown_format.md

But I think for in-editor, the best experience would be something like molten for neovim: https://github.com/benlubas/molten-nvim

That works directly with the kernel

---

Edit*: To clarify, molten doesn't work with marimo. Marimo does have it's own VsCode plugin though. Anecdotally, there does seems to be a tiny bit more demand for neovim over emacs