Show HN: Vex, a new way to run things in Python's virtualenvs

Show HN: Vex, a new way to run things in Python's virtualenvs
pypi.python.org

virtualenvwrapper is very powerful with all kinds of hooks but I just never used all that power and needed things like speed more. virtualenvwrapper provided a lazy loader but that would have various problems from time to time as you'll see on the issue tracker.

So then for a long time I just ran 'virtualenv' and source wherever/bin/activate and found that I really didn't miss virtualenvwrapper all that much, which was a surprise because everyone finds 'workon' invaluable, a position I do understand.

Later my wife taught herself virtualenv and then wrote like 5 lines of shell to do the same thing as virtualenvwrapper (the classic environment-modifying thing) which I found hilarious, and I wrote a version of that in zsh with a little more error checking to make me happy and just jammed it in my dotfiles. Then after some months of using that I decided this is nice enough to publish so I worked on rewriting it as portable shell functions with more error checking and was going to put it on PyPI.

Toward the end of writing that I was feeling pretty finished, when some last detail that I forget made me hacked off about modifying the current shell environment, so on a lark I wrote a prototype of the new idea of only modifying a spawned process's environment in about an hour (most of which was learning further about portable shell) and once it was working I looked at implementing more error checking for all the weird conditions that may arise in shell and I said, you know what, I have no reason not to do this in Python and totally cut the dependency on which shell is being used, who is going to use this without Python anyway?

Then I ended up figuring out how to do prompts and completion and pretty much had a publishable project, which was surprising.

It's still faster to directly run the virtualenv's Python or to use your own small shell function but while YMMV, for my uses virtualenvwrapper is a lot of code I will never use and I use vex every day.

Highlights of my todos: pydoc still doesn't work (the reasons for this are lame) and probably it will be nice to implement --make/--remove to substitute mkvirtualenv/rmvirtualenv (which would also let me dump a pydoc script in virtualenv's bin/ or Script\ dir to fix that problem...)

I currently use http://tudb.org/articles/2014/03/31/vpython/ for pretty much all of my python projects (also, i am the author of vpython).