Vex, a new way to run things in Python's virtualenvs

In plain words

Vex is a tool that runs commands within Python virtual environments without activating them or modifying the current shell. It serves as an alternative to virtualenv's activate/deactivate commands and virtualenvwrapper's workon feature. Unlike traditional activation methods, Vex executes commands in a virtualenv cleanly and works with non-bash shells, offering a simpler approach for developers who need to run isolated Python commands without changing their current environment.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

vex is an alternative to virtualenv’s source wherever/bin/activate and deactivate , and virtualenvwrapper’s workon , and also virtualenv-burrito if you use that. It works in a more elegant way, though it does less. You might find it nicer to use. And it works with non-bash shells. vex just runs any command in a virtualenv, without modifying the current shell environment. To know why this is different, you have to understand a little about how virtualenv normally works. The normal way people use a virtualenv (other than virtualenvwrapper, which does this for them) is to open a shell and source a file called whatever/bin/activate . Sourcing this shell script modifies the environment in the…from pypi.python.org

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