Frequently Asked Questions¶
Why isn’t VirtualFish written in Python?¶
Mostly, for the same reasons virtualenvwrapper is.
Does VirtualFish work with Python 3? What about PyPy?¶
Yes! In fact, you can create Python 3 virtual environments even if your
system Python is Python 2, or vice versa, using the --python
argument
(see the Usage section for full details).
Why does VirtualFish use Virtualenv and not Python’s built-in venv
module?¶
Virtualenv can create both Python 2 and Python 3 virtual environments, whereas
Python’s built-in venv
module can only create Python 3 virtual environments.
That said, since Python 2 is no longer officially supported by the Python
Software Foundation, Python 2 support is a very minor consideration when
deciding which tool to use. The main reason VirtualFish uses Virtualenv is due
to its much faster speed. We have seen Virtualenv create environments in
one-fifth the amount of time that the venv
module takes to perform the
same task.
Why doesn’t VirtualFish use activate.fish?¶
VirtualFish uses its own internal virtualenv activation code instead of the
activate.fish
file that comes with every virtualenv for two main reasons.
One is that when VirtualFish was originally written, activate.fish
didn’t
actually work. The second reason, which is still valid today, is that
activate.fish
tries to modify your fish_prompt
function.
Because fish_prompt
is a function and not a variable like in most other
shells, modifying it programmatically is not trivial, and the way that
Virtualenv accomplishes it is more than a little hacky. The benefit of it being
a function is that the syntax for customising it is much less terse and cryptic
than, say, PS1
on Bash. This is why VirtualFish doesn’t attempt to modify
your prompt, and instead tells you how to do it yourself.