We’re excited to announce the latest update to the Python Environments<\/a> extension for Visual Studio Code. This release focuses on startup performance<\/strong>, reliability<\/strong>, and quality-of-life improvements<\/strong> for terminals and package management.<\/p>\n Activation is now noticeably snappier, especially on remote and containerized workspaces. We made three key changes:<\/p>\n Lazy manager discovery.<\/strong> Pipenv, pyenv, and poetry environments are no longer discovered eagerly on startup. Instead, detection is deferred until you actually interact with one of those managers \u2014 for example, by opening a project that uses a Faster environment resolution.<\/strong> The path from “extension activated” to “interpreter ready” is shorter. Resolution during startup and interpreter selection now completes with less overhead. (#1419<\/a>)<\/p>\n Narrower default workspace scanning.<\/strong> The default search pattern for virtual environments was PET crash recovery.<\/strong> When the PET process crashed mid-refresh, the extension could end up in a broken state with no environments visible. We now retry the refresh after a crash and handle empty or malformed responses defensively, so a transient PET failure no longer leaves you with a blank environment list. (#1442<\/a>, #1447<\/a>, #1444<\/a>)<\/p>\n Conda base environment fix.<\/strong> After a window reload, the conda base environment could be incorrectly restored as a different named environment \u2014 making it appear that your interpreter selection had silently changed. This is now fixed. (#1412<\/a>)<\/p>\n Auto-refreshing package lists.<\/strong> You no longer need to manually refresh the package view after running Multi-project terminal creation.<\/strong> In workspaces with multiple Python projects, creating a new terminal now prompts you to choose which project’s environment to activate, rather than picking one silently. (#1401<\/a>)<\/p>\n PowerShell activation on Windows.<\/strong> Virtual environment activation via PowerShell could fail if the system execution policy blocked scripts. The extension now sets a process-scoped execution policy before running activation, so Faster startup<\/h2>\n
Pipfile<\/code> or pyproject.toml<\/code> with a poetry backend. This eliminates unnecessary work for the majority of users who rely on venv, uv, or conda. (#1423<\/a>, #1408<\/a>)<\/p>\n.\/**\/.venv<\/code>, which triggered a recursive scan of the entire workspace tree. On large projects \u2014 and especially over Remote-SSH \u2014 this could cause the Python Environment Tools (PET) process to hang for 30+ seconds during configuration, leading to cascading timeouts and restart loops (see #1460<\/a>, #1434<\/a>). The default is now .venv<\/code> and *\/.venv<\/code>, which covers the standard layout without deep traversal. If you have virtual environments nested more than one level deep, you can add custom paths via the python-envs.workspaceSearchPaths<\/code> setting. (#1419<\/a>)<\/p>\nImproved reliability<\/h2>\n
Environment updates and terminals<\/h2>\n
pip install<\/code> or pip uninstall<\/code>. The extension now watches for metadata changes in site-packages<\/code> and updates the package list automatically. (#1420<\/a>)<\/p>\n.ps1<\/code> activate scripts work out of the box without requiring system-wide policy changes. (#1414<\/a>)<\/p>\n
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