[emmanueloga_]

Pixi [1]. A lot of people recommend UV, which pixi uses under the hood to install pip packages [2].

The difference between UV and pixi is that pixi is better tooling for working with Conda repositories, and UV focuses in working with pip packages. Pixi allows installing not only pip packages but anything that has been packaged for Conda, which includes a lot of non-python stuff (C/C++ libraries and more).

For instance, I use it to install the Go compiler per-project, since using a global installation tends to grow "polluted" with every single go package that you have ever installed. You could even use it to install Node, NPM or ruby per-project, it just works. It also supports lock files [3].

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1: https://pixi.sh/latest/

2: https://prefix.dev/blog/uv_in_pixi

3: https://pixi.sh/latest/features/lockfile/#why-a-lock-file

[emmanueloga_]

Tangent: to run things with pixi, you need to either 1) `pixi run thing` 2) `pixi shell` to spawn a new shell with adjusted env or 3) `eval "$(pixi shell-hook -s bash)"` (or similar for other supported shells) to modify your current session.

I found that direnv [1] really improved the ergonomics for me. There's some misunderstanding that direnv requires Nix but that's not true. It does one thing and does it well: load .envrc files when you cd that path.

I have a lil `.envrc` that looks like this:

    # Load pixi shell settings.
    eval "$(pixi shell-hook -s bash)"

After that, you can just run `python` and it will run whatever python you asked it to install (`pixi add python` adds the latest python 3 in conda by default).

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1: https://direnv.net/