alternative to jupyter notebook?

edit

At least as a workaround you can save and load intermediate results (see the examples there).

You may also save/load the whole session:

save_session('first_computations.sobj')

Then, in another notebook:

load_session('first_computations.sobj')

Basically, your problem seems not to be Jupyter per se, but the size of your problem's computation.

When my .ipynb file reaches a certain length, sage basically grinds to a halt, and I need to start a new file.

You may have hit a (new ?) bug. Further exploration may be in order.

Also, when I "save" an .ipynb file, the actual calculations aren't saved, and each file takes about half a day to go through and recalculate everything again.

Correct. You should explicitly save the computed objects, and load them when needed. See also save_session, but take note of its limits...

'rburning`'s suggestion to split your work by saving each part's results as needed is sound. BTW, your husband's is also sound, and might reap benefits unrelated to Sagemath ;-)...

Thanks, saving does help. I have no understanding of this process; why most of my stuff can be saved individually but is not saved when I save the session, or the ipynb file. For the moment, as long as it works. I've started on a newer computer, with more RAM, which also helps with some of the issues. Learning Linux will have to wait until we get IT support :-)

It is a good question. When you "save" a Jupyter notebook, you save the string representation of the inputs and the string representation of the outputs, but not the input themselves or the output themselves, nor the global variables. For example, you can see that the lists In and Out (which contains all inputs and all outputs when you save) are empty when you close and open the notebook again : it starts at 1 again with In[1] and Out[1]. By using save_session('a.sobj') and load_session('a.sobj') you reload all variables in the namespace including the In and Out lists.