asdf VS pyenv

In this article, we will use a version manager called asdf‑vm, or simply asdf.

This, but here are some things I've learned to do:

* Use a .local directory under my home directory instead of ~/bin. That's a great prefix when installing from source or tarball at the user level, keeps the top-level of the home directory from getting cluttered with /share /lib /include /etc /lib etc. etc.

* Reach for the package manager first when installing new software, unless there is a good reason not to. It makes keeping things up-to-date easy, and since I use Arch, which uses a rolling release, you pretty much get the latest stuff.

* If I can't get what I want from the package manager, I'll look at what is available using asdf-vm (https://asdf-vm.com/), and failing that, build from source or install from tarball.

* I don't use snap or the like.

I gave up on Windows over 20 years ago, and I can't say enough how liberating it has been. One of the nicest things is that there is a distro for almost every need (see https://distrowatch.com/). I use Arch; but your use case may point to a beginner-friendly distro, such as Mint, Ubuntu, etc., or a repeatable install type of distro, such as NixOS or Guix, or many others.

# Download asdf git clone https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf.git ~/.asdf --branch v0.15.0 # Add the following to ~/.zshrc . "$HOME/.asdf/asdf.sh" # Optional: Completions are configured by either a ZSH Framework asdf plugin # or by adding the following to your .zshrc: fpath=(${ASDF_DIR}/completions $fpath) autoload -Uz compinit && compinit

asdf is a popular version manager that uses a technique called "shimming" to switch between different versions of tools like Python, Node.js, and Ruby. It creates temporary paths to specific versions, modifying the environment to ensure that the correct version of a tool is used in different projects. However, this method can introduce performance overhead due to how these shims work.

I use asdf and direnv to manage my toolchain at the project level, so to improve the integration with Emacs I installed envrc.

Pyenv solves the Python version switching problem but does not support package management.

[pyenv](https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv) is a Python version manager that lets you:

Set your Python version (using pyenv) and create a virtual environment:

pyenv

Python — Biblioteca pyenv

At the top is showing that the __conda_activate is taking up most of the time in my case. Conda is a package manager tool similar to pyenv, which I barely use and only had it when experimenting with something months back.

Personally, I’m a big fan of pyenv, so that’s what I’ll be using here. I’ve already got it installed on my laptop since it’s my go-to for work and personal projects.

PyFabricate queries pyenv for the developer installed Python versions. These are the only ones from which PyFabricate can create Python virtual environments.

We actively use environment managers pyenv, goenv and nvm for managing multiple versions of Python, Golang and NodeJS at Mantis. These provide us with an easily manageable, robust development environments.