[blinry]

Hey :) I don't know how familiar you are with Nix, but the process I describe in the blog post works almost exactly as you describe:

The command `nix shell nixpkgs#qemu` puts the qemu binaries in your $PATH temporarily, you can hit Ctrl-D to leave that environment. And the Nix flake I show works similarly – the specified tools are only available to you when entering the directory where the .envrc file is.

These techniques work without other special shell/terminal software, and you can use Nix on any operating system, not only on NixOS. This is my favorite introduction to the ecosystem, I think you might like it: https://zero-to-nix.com