i hate actually writing code in Jupyter. part of it is just that my muscle memory is all emacs. but its not just the muscle memory, its all the features missing that I usually use but are common in an IDE or good editor. Does anyone know whether emacs ipython notebook is still viable?

Yes Emacs IPython Notebook is alive and kicking [1]. I recently wrote a tool on top of it and found most everything to work, even as I was banging on it pretty hard at times.

- [1] https://github.com/millejoh/emacs-ipython-notebook