IMHO making it easier to run thing on r2d locally using a GUI doesn’t solve most of the problem of actually running things locally on r2d. My personal opinion is getting the configuration files right is the hardest part regardless of what interface it is. I realize this is slightly tangential- but what I mean to say is I think we could make a plugin for something like nteract or atom or something like that but that’s not how I currently use r2d. Based on my experience the hardest things with r2d is how to get the configurations right so it builds and how to run r2d on whatever cloud service you want since we don’t have that documented.
FWIW I think the binder extension is a great way of handling this issue for now.