Mise

Mise is the primary package and environment manager used in this dotfiles repository.

Overview

Mise features and advantages:

• Lightweight installation and faster bootstrapping
• Cross-platform compatibility
• Integrated task management
• Environment variable management
• Project-specific configurations
• Reduced disk space usage compared to Nix-based solutions

Configuration

Mise has been configured with some specific settings:

• Experimental features are enabled
• Lockfile is used to track exact versions
• Downloaded files are kept after installation
• Idiomatic version files are disabled (like ~/.python-version)

Shell Integration

Mise is integrated with the shell through activation and completion hooks.

For activation performance optimizations during Bash startup, see Mise Caching Optimization.

Shell Aliases

Mise manages shell-independent aliases

Environment Variables

Mise handles environment variables, which centralizes the management of the shell environment.

Environments

Activated environments are managed by env var MISE_ENV as a comma-separated list. Implemented global environments are

• devbox: Packages using plugin backend mise-nix
• opt: Optional packages (heavy or rarely used)

Currently they are all activated by default. When declaring project environments locally, they must be appended to the value of activated global environments, else the latter would be deactivated inside the Mise-managed project. Example mise.local.toml:

[env]
MISE_ENV = "{{env.MISE_ENV}},prod,dev"

Environments take precedence over the base Mise environment, so to add a package to a config file higher in the directory hierarchy one has to either cd, use path option -p or, in the case of the global environment, clear the MISE_ENV value as in

MISE_ENV= mise use -g tlrc

Tasks

Integration with Usage

From Usage documentation,

Scripts can be used with the Usage CLI to display help, powerful arg parsing, and autocompletion in any language.

Tasks that specify their CLI with Usage don't need to have the usage runtime (or shebang #!/bin/usr/env -S usage bash for file tasks) for arg parsing, completion and tasks docs generation to work, since mise already integrates usage. This is convenient to prevent syntax highlighting, since the usage shebang breaks it. However, it is necessary for standalone Usage scripts not managed by mise directly as tasks.

Managing Multiple Versions of the Same Tool

Mise supports installing several versions of the same tool, with the latest taking precedence in activation hooks. The binaries of hidden versions can be accessed through mise which as shown in the example below:

$ mise which node --tool=node@23 --cd="$HOME"
/Users/user/.local/share/mise/installs/node/23.11.1/bin/node

$ mise which node --cd="$HOME"
/Users/user/.local/share/mise/installs/node/24.9.0/bin/node

Declare multiple installed versions of the same tool in ~/.config/mise/config.toml:

node = ["latest", "23"]

See all the installed versions (global declared and per-project):

: mise list|rg node
node                              19.9.0
node                              20.13.1
node                              22.19.0
node                              23.11.1                 ~/.config/mise/config.toml         23
node                              24.6.0
node                              24.7.0
node                              24.9.0                  ~/.config/mise/config.toml         latest

or

: mise tool node
Backend:            core:node
Installed Versions: 19.9.0 20.13.1 22.19.0 23.11.1 24.6.0 24.7.0 24.9.0
Active Version:     24.9.0
Requested Version:  latest
Config Source:      ~/.config/mise/config.toml
Tool Options:       [none]

Troubleshooting

If installed tools that should be in PATH can't be correctly resolved, sometimes a re-shim is in order,

mise reshim nvim

or an incorrect version is installed and the tool needs to be re-installed,

mise uninstall --all nvim && mise install nvim