The tradeoff:

Jupyter Notebooks are great for visual output. You can immediately see your output and save it for later. You can easily show it to your colleagues. However, you cannot check them into version control. The json structure is just unreadable.

Version control saves our life because it gives us control over the mighty powers of coding. We can easily see changes and focus on whats important.

Until now, those two worlds were separate. There were some trials to merge the two worlds but none of the projects really felt seamless. The developer experience just was not great.

Introducing Jupytext:

https://github.com/mwouts/jupytext

Jupytext saves two (synced) versions of your notebook. A .ipynb file and a .py file. (Other formats are possible as well.) You check the .py file into your git repo and track your changes but you work in the Jupyter notebook and make your changes there. (If you need some fancy editor commands like refactoring or multicursor, you can just edit the .py file with PyCharm, save the file, refresh your notebook and keep working).

Also, the creator and maintainer, Marc is really helpful and kind and he works really long to make jupytext work for the community. Please try out jupytext and show him some love via starring his github repo. https://github.com/mwouts/jupytext