alt Hacker NewsI started using mise back when it was still called rtx. I was a little annoyed by asdf's quirks and having it replicate that behavior while being faster and less intrusive in my shell configuration was great.
Since then, mise has folded in two capabilities that I needed the most: Task Running and Env Vars.
Overall, it has been a fantastic experience for me. I love how the developer has spent a lot of time ensuring compatibility with existing tools while still building future capabilities.
I will add one thing that I knew I needed but couldn't find anywhere was added through the recent backends feature. I do a lot of trust and R development and there are dev tools that I need installed that I don't use as libraries, just the binaries. It was a problem making sure that those dependencies were installed in a new environment. Now, it's just so easy: I list those in my `mise.toml` file, and that ensures they are installed and installable.
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Count of grey hairs on my head and face is only increasing so I'm gonna be that guy:
Nix/NixOS and Guix are two solid solutions to the problem, because they spin up completely independent, immutable, environments. You don't need to mess around with shell hacks to swap out the correct `npm` or `ruby` binary based on a string in one of several dozen dotfiles.
More or less python-style virtual envs on steroids where it's not just python stuff that isolated, but the entire setup. All your tools, all your config. Throw in `direnv` so you can make your editor and GUI tools aware of it.
The only initial headache is making sure the package is available to pull in -it's easy when it's distributed, but when tools are published through NPM or RubyGems or Crates or just on github that you have to run `go install` to get, then it's a bit of faff. But the same faff that distro managers have keeping, say, debian's sources up to date.
The biggest visible boost has been in my shell startup times. Buying a computer after 5 years with 4 times as many cores and it feeling just as sluggish because nvm and pyenv are parsing the same set of bash files reading from disk was not pleasant. Mise actually made me feel, I didn’t just throw the money into a void