UV Makes Python a Bliss

You know how you can create, manage, and build a project in languages such as JavaScript, Go, and Rust using npm/bun, go, and cargo, respectively?

Python lacked something similar. Even though it’s called “elegant,” the DX outside the .py files was anything but.
I am not saying it didn’t have a package manager, or a builder. It always had, but they weren’t the same thing.

The issue wasn’t the lack of tool, but rather the fragmentation, and speed of them.

How the Stone-age People Did It

1. Create a virtual environment
2. pip install the deps
3. Write the actual code

This looks simple — and it is. But now how do you package it? And WTF? I forgot to activate the env so my global pip is messed up? What packages were there, and what did my mistake add to it?

I guess we’ll never know.

What Came Later…

From the path I took, I found poetry. It was a breeze, but it did so many things, it was hard to learn easily. That still is the case with uv — we’ll get there — but poetry was also slow.

It took its time, and on slower devices you could really feel it because you had to wait on it, unlike the manual process.

So poetry solved one issue python had: fragmentation.

UV Enters The Chat

Of course, written in Rust, uv also claims to do many things in a single package — but much faster.

Here’s what their website says:

A single tool to replace pip, pip-tools, pipx, poetry, pyenv, twine, virtualenv, and more

While also claiming to be:

10–100x faster than pip

A Quick Look Into UV

First, install uv, and open your terminal.

# Initialize your project
uv init my-project

# Change directory
cd my-project

# Add your dependencies
uv add rich

In all this, uv has automatically created and initialized your virtual environment.
Cheers.

What? You don’t have python installed? Don’t worry.

uv python install 3.12 3.14

You just installed two python versions, and you can even switch between them per project or via uv run.

uv aimed and mostly did solve the two issues we started with: fragmentation and speed.

Go try out uv for yourself.