I’ve been making some changes to how I configure my local development environment, and I wanted to share what I’ve decided on.

Let me introduce to you, mise (pronounced “meez”), a tool for managing your programming language versions.

Why Not Just Use Homebrew?

Homebrew is great for installing most things, but I don’t like using it for programming language version management. It is too brittle. How many times has brew upgrade decided to switch your Python or Node version on you, breaking projects in the process? Too many, in my experience.

mise solves this elegantly. It doesn’t replace Homebrew entirely, you’ll still use that for general stuff but for managing your system programming language versions, mise is the perfect tool.

mise the Great, mise the Mighty

mise has all the features you’d expect from a version manager, plus some nice extras:

Shims support: If you want shims in your bash or zsh, mise has you covered. You’ll need to update your RC file to get them working, but once you do, you’re off to the races.

Per-project configuration: mise can work at the application directory level. You set up a mise.toml file that defines its behavior for that specific project.

Environment management: You can set up environment variables directly in the toml file, auto-configure your package manager, and even have it auto-create a virtual environment.

It can also load environment variables from a separate file if you’d rather not put them in the toml (which you probably want if you’re checking the file in).

It’s not a package manager: This is important. You still need poetry or uv for Python package management. As a reminder: don’t ever use pip. Just don’t.

A Quick Example

Here’s what a .mise.toml file looks like for a Python project:

[tools]
python = "3.12.1"
"aqua:astral-sh/uv" = "latest"

[env]
# uv respects this for venv location
UV_PROJECT_ENVIRONMENT = ".venv"

_.python.venv = { path = ".venv", create = true }

Pretty clean, right? This tells mise to use Python 3.12.1, install the latest version of uv, and automatically create a virtual environment in .venv.

Note on Poetry Support

I had to install python from source using mise to get poetry working. You will want to leave this setting to be true. There is some problem with the precompiled binaries they are using.

You can install global python packages, like poetry, with the following command:

mise use --global poetry@latest

Yes, It’s Written in Rust

The programming veterans among you may have noticed the toml configuration format and thought, “Ah, must be a Rust project.” And you’d be right. mise is written in Rust, which means it’s fast! The project is stable, has a ton of GitHub stars, and is actively maintained.

Task Runner Built-In

One feature I wasn’t expecting: mise has a built-in task runner. You can define tasks right in your mise.toml:

[tasks."venv:info"]
description = "Show Poetry virtualenv info"
run = "poetry env info"

[tasks.test]
description = "Run tests"
run = "poetry run pytest"

Then run them with mise run test or mise r venv:info.

If you’ve been putting off setting up Make for a project, this is a compelling alternative. The syntax is cleaner and you get descriptions for free

I’ll probably keep using Just for more complex build and release workflows, but for simple project tasks, mise handles it nicely. One less tool to install.

My Experience So Far

I literally just switched everything over today, and it was a smooth process. No too major so far. I’ll report back if anything breaks, but the migration from my previous setup was straightforward.

Now, I need to get the other languages I use, like Go, Rust, and PHP setup and moved to mise. Having everything consolidated into one tool is going to be so nice.

If you’re tired of Homebrew breaking your language versions or juggling multiple version managers for different languages, give mise a try.

The documentation is solid, and the learning curve is minimal.