Yes, that's definitely a possibility. Though it would be nice if it were more nicely integrated into an environment like RStudio where you can interactively set breakpoints, watch variables, etc. while still maintaining the interactivity.
I do the tmux/vim too, but for exploratory work the experience is less well-integrated than it could be with an Rstudio-like IDE.
I agree, and the IDE setups can be very valuable for certain use cases or certain preferences. The equivalent thing in the IPython shell approach, basically using souped-up pudb, is not quite as nicely interactive with the debugging cycle, since setting breakpoints, watchpoints, etc., is either a matter of editing them into the source code and re-running, or becoming a master of specifying them on the command line, both of which require stepping out of the tight iteration workflow slightly (but to be fair, they also offer more power than the preconfigured options availabe in the IDE debugger features).
Yes, my IDE is vim but it's a hard sell to a lot of folks... especially having to map a shortcut key to "import ipdb; ipdb.set_trace()" for breakpoints...
Rodeo [1] was an attempt at an IDE but development died, and now that yhat's been acquired, there's no sign of any further development. I wish the Jupyter folks would push more in this direction (and they are with Jupyter Lab) but I get the sense they are really invested in the notebook paradigm.
Well, I guess they are invested in it as a component of the JuyterLab toolbox, but JupyterLab tries to integrate it with consoles and editing windows: https://lwn.net/Articles/748937/
I do the tmux/vim too, but for exploratory work the experience is less well-integrated than it could be with an Rstudio-like IDE.