A month or two ago, I stumbled on justpath, which is worth installing to help clean up any PATH environment issues you may or may not realize you have.
I was frustrated because every time I created a new tab in iTerm2, it took three or more seconds for whatever slowed everything in my bash/dotfiles.
With justpath, I found it straightforward to identify and address several paths related to ruby, rbenv, cargo, golang, and others that were causing issues. Rather than continue to fight these apps, I deleted them and removed them from my .bash* files. To see if I broke anything, I opened a new iTerm tab, and I had a new shell prompt in less than a second.
Since I needed access to Ruby, NPM, and other tools, I switched over to mise, which promises to be one tool for managing these languages and tools. mise is also written in Rust, so I know it’s fast by default.
To get started, check out Mise’s Quickstart docs in their README. I modified their bash example and added it to my .bash* files.
if command -v mise > /dev/null 2>&1; then
eval "$(mise activate bash)";
fi
Once Mise was set up, and I opened a new tab, I installed Go, Node.js, Ruby, and Rust:
# to install Go
mise install golang
# to install Node.js
mise install node
# to install Ruby
mise install ruby
# to install Rust
mise install rust
# to reshim/add these tool to our path...
mise reshim
Eventually, I used Mise to install kubectl (boo) and yarn (hiss). Here is a list of everything on my older MacBook Pro that Mise is managing for me.
$ mise list
Plugin Version Config Source Requested
go 1.22.2
kubectl 1.22.2
node 20.10.0 ~/.tool-versions 20.10.0
ruby 3.3.0
rust 1.77.1
yarn 1.22.19
Another nice feature of Mise is that you can list the versions of each tool that you want Mise to install and manage for you in a .tool-versions file.
$ cat ~/.tool-versions
# direnv latest
# golang latest
# kubectl 1.22.2
# nodejs 18.9.1
# nodejs lts
# ruby 3.1.2
# starship latest
# yarn 1.22.19
nodejs 20.10.0
As a nice bonus, I discovered I could use Mise to manage the direnv and starship tools. In theory, Mise can also replace direnv with their built-in environment support), but I haven’t tried that feature yet.
Results
Mise is a nice win. I cut my new iTerm2 tab/session time down to close to 1/4 of a second, and I have more granular control over which exact versions of each tool I’m using.
Overall, I still prefer to use pyenv to manage my Python versions, so I’m keeping that for now mainly because I use pyenv-virtualenvwrapper and a few other nice-to-haves. See my Python Development on macOS Notes: pyenv and pyenv-virtualenvwrapper article on why and how I manage those.
