Activate Environments in Terminal Using Environment Variables

Python extension now activates the selected environment in the terminal without running any activation commands (#11039).

Traditionally, when working with Python environments in the terminal, you'd see indicators showing which Python environment is currently active. For example:

However, due to a technical limitation, you may now notice that this indicator is either absent or that you continue to see an existing indicator like (base). Nonetheless, please be assured that the environment is still activated.

Pro tips:

• You can hover over the terminal tab to see which environment is currently activated in terminal:

  

• Click "Show environment contributions" if you're interested in which specific environment variables were applied to activate this terminal:

  

Limitations:

Such implicit activation will not work in the following case:

• Fish is selected as the shell or shell integration is turned off: "terminal.integrated.shellIntegration.enabled": false
• And your shell init script (.bashrc, profile.ps1 etc.) activates another environment (say myshellenv) for your shell. For eg. this can happen if "base" conda environment is activated by default: #20885.

In this case myshellenv will override the selected environment and terminal is activated using myshellenv instead. This can be solved for conda base case by running the following command and restarting your shell:

conda config --set auto_activate_base False

In other cases feel free to let us know via Python: Report Issue command and we can help exploring workarounds for you.

Known issues:

Please upvote if you run into any of these:

• Env set in my fish config prevails over selected environment #184009; workaround stated above in limitations section could help.