Many of those tools have important functions other than dependency isolation. Pyenv is perhaps the only tool mentioned that can be replaced by docker. However, pyenv has a marginal usability advantage over docker. You can set a python version or virtualenv to activate automatically in a project folder - no need to start a container.

Poetry is primarily a packager. Pipx installs python scripts like gita, poetry, youtube-dl etc as user commands. They cannot be replaced by docker.

Finally, I never had a good development experience inside a docker container. Pyenv, pipx and poetry play much nicer with the system development tools and give a better development experience.

If you want to easily read or write files anywhere, or if you want to edit/develop those scripts easier.

Not everything is a web-accessible service, and sometimes you do care about short startup time -- for example, if you have a file conversion script that you need to run on 1000's of files.

You can kinda-sort fake it with "docker exec", but it is really awkward, and at some point, pyenv etc.. is just easier.

It does work with pyenv, but can be slightly tricky. I used a setup recommended by Jacob Kaplan [1] that uses pyenv, pipx and poetry.

Pyenv is used to manage different versions of Python and virtual environments (using pyenv-virtualenv [2]). Pipx will be accessible only from the python version or virtual environment it is installed to. However, the programs that you install using pipx (like gita or poetry) have their own virtual environments, and run reliably irrespective of accessibility of pipx and what you have activated using pyenv.

It's easier to install pipx into the pyenv python version that you have set up as global. This ensures that you have access to pipx most of the time. You could just spawn a temporary shell with global python to access pipx otherwise.

[1] https://jacobian.org/2019/nov/11/python-environment-2020/ [2] https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv-virtualenv