Here's a sortof-blog-post and some more discussion about the superiority of modifying a subshell rather than sourcing a bunch of janky shell-functions that modify your current shell: https://gist.github.com/datagrok/2199506
I did not know about invewrapper, thanks. pew is another decent name.
edit:
after looking at the doc, my impression is that invewrapper seems to follow virtualenvwrapper's design more closely with a large number of subcommands with names similar to virtualenvwrapper's, most of virtualenvwrapper's options and features (except hooks and maybe some of the project stuff). I would describe the options as "comprehensive."
I specifically wanted something with a dramatically simpler interface and feature set.
invewrapper also seems primarily or only intended to run a shell. I get personal use out of running arbitrary commands under vex as if it were sudo or something.
It is an improvement not to modify the current environment and couple tightly to specific shells either way, though.
I just discovered your project, so I haven't tried it yet, but since the approach seems similar, it should work just fine on Windows (maybe with some tweaks)... and you can just add the Powershell prompt to your docs, no need to envy it :)
I agree that pew is intended as a virtualenvwrapper replacement, obviously you can get something similar to `vex env cmd` with `pew in env cmd`...
Unfortunately I've neglected a little bit the project lately: the most serious thing I want to do is rewrite the test suite, to be able to run it on windows.
Since you mention PowerShell maybe you use it quite often? I'd like to get some feedback on Windows (I added Windows support out of completeness, but I seldom use that OS), since I don't know anyone who uses pew on windows :)
BTW, I discovered some new tools to manage environments in the last year:
pyenv (I actually already knew rbenv), modules[1] and I even started to use Nix
These have not the same scope, and in fact I appreciate the latter 2 idea of using the same system to manage dependencies and versions for all different kind of tools. I don't have an opinion yet on what's the correct way to do these things so, in the meanwhile, even tools that are python-specific (like ours) have a niche to fill
Here's another project that attempts something similar: https://github.com/berdario/invewrapper
Here's a sortof-blog-post and some more discussion about the superiority of modifying a subshell rather than sourcing a bunch of janky shell-functions that modify your current shell: https://gist.github.com/datagrok/2199506