Hydrogen
Hydrogen is an interactive coding environment that supports Python, R, JavaScript and other Jupyter kernels.
Background
Hydrogen was inspired by Bret Victor's ideas about the power of instantaneous feedback and the design of Light Table. Running code inline and in real time is a more natural way to develop. By bringing the interactive style of Light Table to the rock-solid usability of Atom, Hydrogen makes it easy to write code the way you want to.
You also may be interested in our latest project – nteract – a desktop application that wraps up the best of the web based Jupyter notebook.
Features
- execute a line, selection, or block at a time
- rich media support for plots, images, and video
- watch expressions let you keep track of variables and re-run snippets after every change
- completions from the running kernel, just like autocomplete in the Chrome dev tools
- code can be inspected to show useful information provided by the running kernel
- one kernel per language (so you can run snippets from several files, all in the same namespace)
- interrupt or restart the kernel if anything goes wrong
- use a custom kernel connection (for example to run code inside Docker), read more in the "Custom kernel connection (inside Docker)" section
Plugins for Hydrogen
Hydrogen has support for plugins. Feel free to add your own to the list:
If you are interested in building a plugin take a look at our plugin API documentation.
How it works
Hydrogen implements the messaging protocol for Jupyter. Jupyter (formerly IPython) uses ZeroMQ to connect a client (like Hydrogen) to a running kernel (like IJulia or iTorch). The client sends code to be executed to the kernel, which runs it and sends back results.
Why "Hydrogen"?
Hydrogen atoms make up 90% of Jupiter by volume.
Plus, it was easy to make a logo.
