I used nvm for years, but my development workflow became more and more terminal-oriented to the point I was spawning new ones several times an hour. Nvm took almost a second to launch, easily consuming 99% of the startup time for each shell. I tried writing some custom code to lazy load nvm only when I needed it which worked alright, but I ended up switching to Asdf because it loads almost instantaneously and haven’t looked back. The fact that it supports managing multiple different tools is a nice bonus, but I really only use it for node.

I think I started using it for much the same reason; I was having trouble with the official node installer. But once I uninstalled rvm as well, I was sold. Now I can have a project with a specific elixir/erlang/node version written into my `.tool-versions` file, and I don't have to worry about anything.

I hate how it bears the same name as the de-facto standard Common Lisp build tool, ASDF.

https://common-lisp.net/project/asdf/

I have to read the README twice to see what is it about. What is extensible version manager? Managing what exactly. So I guess it's the reason asdf is not popular

It replaces gvm/rbenv/pyenv/nvm/etc. with a single CLI. Saves you from having to use multiple shell completion scripts, bashrc entries and CLIs. Useful if you work with multiple dev languages on your computer.

And nowhere in the README tells me about that. Your first sentence immediately makes it clear

asdf maintainer here. We are in the process of re-organizing the README and all of the documentation. In it's present state the README isn't particularly clear about what asdf is and why it is useful. One of the maintainers already has a PR out to fix this - https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/pull/441

If you have any suggestions on what the readme should say feel free to open an issue or a small PR.

I'm sorry, I could have sworn the README used to have a snappy description.

Think of it like a Swiss Army knife of version managers that can handle all the languages you use, per-project. And it's all just bash scripts, and installs everything into a visible place on your drive.

It worked rather badly with Haskell last time I checked (Darwin, Fish shell).

I'm sorry to hear that but I'm happy to help if there is anything I can do as a maintainer. The Haskell plugin isn't maintained by the core team, and it may have some issues of it's own that need to be fixed. If there was something specific that caused you trouble let me know and I'll see what I can do to get it addressed.

Thanks a lot for the reply and willingness to help, but I'm not using anything Haskell related at the moment. Might submit some issues in the future though.

To be fair, the entire Haskell tool chain is finicky as heck in my experience.