JUjustinmayer·Aug 26, 2023
If you use Fish shell and Python, my project VirtualFish can make managing virtual environments a lot easier and more fun:
https://github.com/justinmayer/virtualfish
In Fish – A friendly interactive shelljustinmayer
virtualfish
Shell2013–2023
justinmayer / virtualfish
virtualfish
Fish shell tool for managing Python virtual environments
7Distinct people
10Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
1.1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Fish shell tool for managing Python virtual environments
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
I've been using and contributing to Virtualfish, which replicates nearly all of virtualenvwrapper's functionality. Highly recommended: https://github.com/adambrenecki/virtualfish
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year10 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-05-17 11:59:15 UTC to 2023-08-26 17:19:15 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
10 sourcesI use asdf and its Python plugin [1] to install Python interpreter versions.
For managing virtual environments on my preferred shell (Fish), I use (and maintain) VirtualFish [2].
For managing project dependencies, I activate environments via VirtualFish and then use Poetry [3] to update the dependencies within the environments.
[1]: https://github.com/danhper/asdf-python
[2]: http://github.com/justinmayer/virtualfish
[3]: http://python-poetry.org
In Changes to Homebrew adversely affect Python developmentVirtualfish is amazing: https://github.com/adambrenecki/virtualfish
In Use pew, not virtualenvwrapper, for Python virtualenvsI use virtualfish, which is even better:
https://github.com/adambrenecki/virtualfish
In Fish Shell Design Principles> everyone finds 'workon' invaluable, a position I do understand.
At first I wanted to praise virtualfish [1] and its ability to automatically activate a virtualenv when I cd into it, but then I realized that vex's way does indeed make more sense. What do we do in a virtualenv? We basically just run pip to do various things, or run the program (in case it's an application and not a library) or test suite.
So yeah, I think I'm gonna switch. The added portability is a nice bonus.
[1] https://github.com/adambrenecki/virtualfish
In Show HN: Vex, a new way to run things in Python's virtualenvs1. Fish syntax breaks virtualenv
You might want to try virtualfish [1]
[1] - https://github.com/adambrenecki/virtualfish
In Fish shell 2.1As nagisa said, you can simply use: . bin/activate.fish
Even better is Virtualfish, which I've been using and contributing to very happily: https://github.com/adambrenecki/virtualfish
In Fish shell 2.0🐟 Fish rocks. I've been using it exclusively for the last year, and I can't imagine giving it up.
There seem to be a number of misconceptions, which I will endeavor to address. The first is: "Fish isn't POSIX/bash-compliant, so there are compatibility problems." POSIX non-compliance is a feature, not a disadvantage, of the fish shell. It means there is less legacy baggage and syntactical inconsistency. I can count the number of POSIX/bash compliance-related issues I've had with fish on one hand, all of which were easily dealt with. For example, Vim assumes that your shell is sh compatible, but adding set shell=sh in your .vimrc solves that. The only other significant one for me was virtualenvwrapper, which doesn't support fish. Not a problem: Virtualfish solves that handily: https://github.com/adambrenecki/virtualfish
Want to run a bash
Read the rest
script? Just run bash fooshnizzle.sh. Want to switch to bash for a moment? Run bash and then exit when you want to switch back to fish. This POSIX-compatibility topic is, in my opinion, much ado about nothing.
Another misunderstanding seems to be, "I can do XYZ in bash, but fish doesn't support that." Fish purposefully limits the number of "builtins" -- commands that fish includes by default -- in order to maintain simplicity. For me, that's a feature. When I find that there's something I want to be easier to do in fish, I whip up a tiny function to do it. Not only is that extremely easy to do in fish, but then that command performs precisely the way I want it to. I haven't pushed many of those to my dotfile repository yet, but you can check out some of my fish functions there: https://github.com/justinmayer/dotfiles/tree/master/fish
Fish is fast, the auto-completion is amazingly helpful, and it's intuitive to use without too much configuration. Give it a try. 🐟
I've been using and contributing to Virtualfish, which replicates nearly all of virtualenvwrapper's functionality. Highly recommended: https://github.com/adambrenecki/virtualfish
In Fish shell 2.0Out of the box, no. I've since switch to rbenv, which I actually like much better, and https://github.com/adambrenecki/virtualfish is a very nice port of virtualenvwrapper to fish.
In Fish shell 2.0