Better tool for listing virtual environments

I love virtualenvwrapper. You can manage your virtual environments such as create/delete or list. Also you can kick additional variables on activation.

virtualenvwrapper stores environments under ~/.virtualenvs/. When you ask for listings of installed environments in your user environment, It basically iterates over folder names under ~/.virtualenvs/ folder.

I currently have 24 folders, which means 24 virtual environments are available. Let’s ask for list:

$ time lsvirtualenv

real    0m5.254s
user    0m3.627s
sys     0m1.241s

What was the operation ?

1. cd to ~/.virtualenvs/
2. loop through folders and print their name

It took 5 seconds on a 2,9 GHz Intel Core i7 MacBook Pro :) Don’t you think It’s a bit too much ? I tried to implement same functionality via Bash script:

$ time ls-virtual-env
real    0m0.514s
user    0m0.114s
sys     0m0.169s

It took almost half of a second. I wondered, If I can boost the speed up more! Yes I can… I implemented the same functionality on Golang and added extra features such as getting the Python version, coloring etc…

$ time lsvirtualenvs
real    0m0.066s
user    0m0.139s
sys     0m0.190s

Unbelievable! All done in mili-seconds. Most of the time consumed while executing python --version command. You can download or inspect the code on GitHub

You can install via;

$ go get -u github.com/vigo/lsvirtualenvs