No,its better to create a notebook with .py extension and use light Percent format for cells. This creates a text file notebook that can be git diff'd

> light Percent format

For reference

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/jupyter-support-py

https://jupytext.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples.html

https://jupytext.readthedocs.io/en/latest/formats.html#the-l...

https://jupytext.readthedocs.io/en/latest/formats.html#the-p...

One of Matlab's best features.

Absolutely. You can always export it as .ipynb. You have now the full power of an IDE (with Pylint, Pytest, Black etc.) at hand.

The python ecosystem is moving towards the MyST format for jupyter notebooks to solve this issue,

https://jupyterbook.org/en/stable/content/myst.html

This! And Spyder can work as a jupyter notebook by evaluating on a cell-by-cell basis.

I don't know about git, but github is able to do smart diffs with .ipynb files.

Notebooks are complex because they allow you to mix different cell types and keep outputs. That's not a notebook.

I think there is also a Jupytext extension so that they can just be saved as markdown files.

Or even better: as plain python files, whose comment paragraphs are interpreted as markdown cells. Thus you have just one file notebook.py that you can run directly with the python interpreter, open it with a text editor, or open it with the browser and edit/run it like a notebook. Jupytext is fantastic!

Why this is not core functionality of jupyter is beyond me.

Indeed. It’s hard to beat the IDE concept here. Especially given the unique features of VS Code like remote development and dev containers.