Install and setup useful applications with pipx

It is good to install globally few applications useful for developing with Python. We will show here how it can be done with pipx.

Note

Pipx installs applications in isolated and dedicated virtual environments, and it is completely transparent for the users.

Install pipx

One first needs to install pipx itself. On Debian (and other Linux distributions), one can run:

python3 -m pip install pipx
python3 -m pipx ensurepath

Install and setup Mercurial

We start by installing Mercurial, which is a version control application (like Git, but easier and safer) and which can be used to interact with Git repositories hosted on Github or on Gitlab instances:

pipx install mercurial
pipx inject mercurial hg-git hg-evolve hg-fluiddyn
# potentially useful to fix ssl issues (macOS)
pipx inject mercurial certifi
pipx install hg-setup

We explain here how to finalize the Mercurial installation.

Install and setup xonsh

# a shell much user friendly that bash
pipx install 'xonsh[full]'
pipx inject xonsh xontrib-vox xontrib-argcomplete

One can setup xonsh by running xonfig web and then adding the line xontrib load coreutils vox in the file ~/.xonshrc.

Install PDM, Nox and mdformat

Finally, let’s add few other applications with pipx:

# https://pdm-project.org
pipx install pdm
pipx install nox
pipx install mdformat
pipx inject mdformat mdformat-myst
pipx install pypi-timemachine
pipx install formattex
pipx install formatbibtex
#
pipx install argcomplete
activate-global-python-argcomplete