Comparison with direnv

[michaelpj]

From reading the README this sounds very similar to what direnv gets me, which is widely used in the Nix community. It would be very helpful to have an explanation of the differences!

[thenbe]

I believe direnv is primarily concerned with automatically triggering certain actions depending on the current directory. Actions such as load/unload environment variables or entering a nix development environment (e.g. use flake).

direnv, as far as I can tell, has no bearing on the type of shell you enter, be it bash, zsh, fish, nushell, etc. The scenario I am most familiar with is nix develop, where the default is always bash. any-nix-shell and similar tools (e.g. nix-your-shell) allow you to change the default shell for those commands that would otherwise always default to bash.