> 2. Centralized venv storage — keep .venvs out of your project dirs
I do not like this. virtual environments have been always associated with projects and colocated with them. Moving .venv to centralized storage recreates conda philosophy which is very different from pip/uv approach.
In any case, I am using pixi now and like it a lot.
It's been open for two years but it looks like there's a PR in active development for it right now: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/pull/18214
uv is just so fast that i deal with it.
…but I don’t have everything in a git repo. Some of my “projects” are just local scraps for trying things out.
And it doesn’t account for any other tooling that may not respect gitignore by default.
it’s my biggest problem with npm too. Ive worked around it long enough, it’s just annoying.
Putting the venv in the project repository is a mess; it mixes a bunch of third party code and artifacts into the current workspace. It also makes cleaning disk space a pain, since virtualenvs end up littered all over the place. And every time you “git clean” you have to bootstrap all over again.
Perhaps a flag to control this might be a good fit, but honestly, I always found uv’s workflow here super annoying.
If for some rare reason you wanted to delete all venvs, a find command is easy enough to write.
UV_PROJECT_ENVIRONMENT=$HOME/.virtualenvs/{env-name} uv {command}
Virtual environments have been always associated with projects in your use case I guess.
In my use case, they almost never are. Most people in my industry have 1-2 venvs that they use across all their projects, and uv forcing it into a single project directory made it quite inconvenient and unnecessary duplication of the same sets of libraries.
I dislike conda not because of the centralized venvs, but because it's bloated, poorly engineered, slow and inconvenient to use.
At the end of the day, this gives us choice. People can use uv or they can use fyn and have both use cases covered.
Actually, uv intelligently uses hardlinks or reflinks to avoid file duplication. On the surface, venvs in different projects are duplicate, but in reality they reference the same files in the uv's cache.
BTW, pixi does the same. And `pixi global` allows you to create global environments in central location if you prefer this workflow.
EDIT: I forgot to mention an elephant in the room. With agentic AI coding you do want all your dependencies to be under your project root. AI agents run in sandboxes and I do not want to give them extra permissions pocking around in my entire storage. I start an agent in the project root and all my code and .venv are there. This provides sense of locality to the agent. They only need to pock around under the project root and nowhere else.
pixi is a general multi-languge, multi-platform package manager. I am using it now on my new macbook neo as a homebrew _replacement_. Yes, it goes beyond python and allows you to install git, jj, fzf, cmake, compilers, pandoc, and many more.
For python, pixi uses conda-forge and PyPI as package repos and relies on uv's rattler dependency resolver. pixi is as fast as uv (it uses fast code path from uv) but goes further beyond python wheels. For detail see [0] or google it :-)
Pixi is very python focused, it's both a tool manager and a library dependency manager (see uv/pip). Mise considered library dependency an anti-goal for a long time, while I don't see that on the website anymore I haven't seen any movement to go into that space.