[CraigJPerry]

Yeah i don't think there is a neater way to do this right now. One thing that maybe saves some effort is a "uv sync" will pay attention to the $VIRTUAL_ENV env var, but only if that var points to a venv that already exists. You can't point to an empty dir and have it create the venv.

  # make a venv somehow, probably via the editor so it knows about the venv, saving a 3rd step to tell it which venv to use
  $ env VIRTUAL_ENV=.venv/ uv sync --script foo.py

but it's still janky, not sure it saves much mental tax

[mh-]

I'd encourage using --dry-run before running uv sync, by default it can be destructive.

  By default, an exact sync is performed: uv removes packages that are not declared as dependencies of the project. Use the `--inexact` flag to keep extraneous packages.