Getting ob-ipython to show documentation during company completion.

ob-ipython is an Emacs package that enables org-babel to talk to a running ipython kernel. The upshot of this is that you can use org-mode instead of the jupyter notebook for interspersing executable code, results and documentation.

The screenshot from the ob-ipython github shows it in action:

Personally, I would like to use this for controlling ipython kernels on remote GPU- and deep learning-capable Linux machines, all via Emacs on my laptop. The juyter notebook is really fantastic, but it’s not Emacs.

You could also use ein for this, but then you would have to give up org-mode.

As I was testing ob-ipython yesterday, I noticed that its company-backend (completion system for Emacs) doc-buffer support was absent. Usually, as you’re exploring possible code completions, you can press <f1> or C-h to show help on the currently highlighted completion candidate.

Fast-forward an hour or two of Emacs Lisp surgery, and I was able to hook up the ob-ipython company-mode backend to ob-ipython’s inspection facility. Now pressing C-h gets you detailed help in a company-documentation buffer!

Here is my github pull request, and here is a screenshot of the company-mode ob-ipython documentation in action:

Hopefully this will be merged soon so it can find its way onto the Melpa package archives.

Here’s a bonus screenshot showing the ob-ipython notes from my org-mode journal where you can see embedded Python code that has been executed via the connected ipython kernel, with the resultant SVG format plot embedded and displayed inline:

P.S. I am currently disabling elpy-mode when the ob-ipython minor mode is active, until I figure out a better solution to elpy interfering with ob-ipython.

(use-package ob-ipython
  :config
  ;; for now I am disabling elpy only ob-ipython minor mode
  ;; what we should actually do, is just to ensure that
  ;; ob-ipython's company backend comes before elpy's (TODO)
  (add-hook 'ob-ipython-mode-hookp
            (lambda ()
              (elpy-mode 0)
              (company-mode 1)))
  (add-to-list 'company-backends 'company-ob-ipython)
  (add-to-list 'org-latex-minted-langs '(ipython "python")))

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