Hmm, what is mamba? I thought I was at least sort of up to date with the various python dependency managers, but that one is new to me.

Relatedly, I have a grand vision of having as part of my development environment a jupyter notebook always at hand, in which to explore data as necessary, whip up scripts, accumulate little helper functions, etc. Basically, any time I have that "hm, I wonder..." itch, I'd like to be able to quickly whip up a solution in my notebook. I'm a skilled developer in terms of larger systems, but have a weakness when it comes to very early stage "throwaway" scripts to answer ad-hoc questions.

I spent a few days trying to set up jupyterlab in an "ideal" way, so that I could have easy access to python libraries within my notebook, and also a reproducible environment since I plan to push my working directory to GitHub and would like to sync across different machines. I got confused by virtualenv vs venv, and tried conda to install libraries, but ran into various problems. Oh, and part of it was trying to have nbdev (from the fastai folks) as part of this toolkit.

Anyone have a setup like this that they use and want to share? Part of me wants to just throw in the towel and learn R and RStudio, since I've heard its ggplot is the best plotting library anyway.