I replaced virtualenvwrapper with 100 lines of bash, simplifying the core experience into something you can drop on any box without installing anything.

A VirtualEnv Wrapper#

I was a fan of virtualenvwrapper (VEW) for years. I attribute having an unusually smooth experience with Python to always using VEW for development. VEW made it easy to have virtualenvs (venvs) that were unobtrusive.

My favorite aspect of the project is that it would store every venv together in a common directory, making it easy to manage or search them separately from a project. That may seem like a small detail, but I loved the freedom I got to ensure text searches in the project wouldn’t include whatever it found in the venvs. Keeping env directories outside my project directory meant that, by default, I didn’t have to use any cli flags to ignore a directory, or configure VSCode to ignore some directory, etc.