laptop VS direnv

My last setup was nearly 100% covered by Thoughtbot's laptop script: https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop. Now I am highly inspired by @rwieruch and his personal setup documented in a post from February: https://www.robinwieruch.de/mac-setup-web-development. I will combine "copying" system preferences from my iMac, updating my old script based on Thoughtbot's and picking additional highlights from Robin.

Nice work! I’ve used a similar script for Ruby dev (actually I use it as a reference rather than just running it, but still useful): https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop

The oldest commits on this script are 11 years old and nothing in the last year, which seems quite stable. At the same time I was able to ask an intern to just run it, and bam! they have everything they need installed.

One use for it that surprised me was hearing a colleague saying that he reinstalls his OS after every change of client and runs the setup script again so there’s no fear of IP theft but also no downtime from having an unconfigured machine.

I think direnv already does a good job in this space, and it's already available in your package manager.

https://direnv.net/

I switched from asdf to mise after a comment on lobste.rs[1] suggested I do so a few months ago, and I have been very happy with it.

It sands off some of asdf's sharp UI edges and provides a somewhat larger but still reasonable feature set; I've also replaced most of my direnv[2] usage with it.

The mise -> asdf comparison page is useful[3]

1: https://lobste.rs/s/66uxbj/how_love_homebrew#c_mvmsjp

2: https://direnv.net/

3: https://mise.jdx.dev/dev-tools/comparison-to-asdf.html

I also made the export diff configurable, motivated by this post: https://github.com/direnv/direnv/pull/1233

Nice.

For years I've been using [direnv](https://direnv.net/) for this, setting environment variables which git picks up. This looks like a more feature complete equivalent, although to be honest I only really need switching of committer email and the SSH key used.

Direnv, for the uninitiated, loads and unloads environment variables when directories are entered and exited. Under every project folder there is a `$PROJ_DIR/.envrc` which contains:

buffer-env: A pure-Elisp version of the direnv utility. Useful to make Emacs aware of Python virtualenvs (which, judging by the questions posted here, is unfortunately still a complication for a lot of people). Similar to (and inspired by) envrc, but doesn't require the direnv program.

You can look at direnv to see this in action as they wrote shell hooks that get loaded into the shell profile and are executed on every prompt. https://direnv.net/

Yes, most Nix users employ https://direnv.net or the equivalent for your IDE of choice. Emacs for instance has https://github.com/purcell/envrc which set per-buffer variables.