I have switched my full OS-level dev env to https://mise.jdx.dev/ from Homebrew+pipx+npm, initially as an experiment but found out that it actually works amazingly well. Many things get installed directly from GitHub releases or a corresponding package manager (uv, pnpm, go get ...), zero glue code to "repackage", zero version lag. You can install any arbitrary version of a package, even multiple ones at once, and dynamically adjust which ones are active per working folder or explicitly through environments.
Funnily Mise does not support dependencies, and I was quite surprised that it mostly doesn't matter, as either pnpm/uv handles that, or it's a static binary that just works. In the past, had the unfortunate experience of packaging a Python application for Homebrew (the ridiculous process involved importing around 50 dependencies as "resources", building every single one from source or manually checking if it's already on Homebrew, declaring build toolchains for 5 different programming languages as dependencies, waiting over an hour for CI to finish on every update, then an upstream update introduced a "build-time dependency loop" and the project suddenly became unpackable for Homebrew) so I totally get why Mise took the "easy way out" and just relies on language-specific package managers directly.
Only thing from my Brewfile that I couldn't replace was the Docker CLI (needed to interact with Colima). And I still use Homebrew for casks. I encourage others to experiment with their dev setups, there are some amazing new tools out there.
Mise does seem to be in a class of its own. As mentioned elsewhere, it does rely on other registries such as aqua and obviously asdf. For people who want to use Mise for brew packages, there's https://github.com/kennyg/mise-zerobrew.
Glad you're having a good experience, but I personally switched from Mise back to Brew. I don't know if it was just my skill issue, but there were too many packages which found Mise to be problematic.
I've been using it lightly as a "better nvm" for a longer time, but only switched to it as a primary "tool installer" a few months ago. I've seen it improve quite a lot over the time, you could give it another try!
As a PHP developer, I found mise's support to be pretty sub-par compared to Shivam Mathur's packaging work for homebrew. Most of my projects are using Docker anyway, the local PHP is for stuff like static analysis that doesn't need it. And I've got a couple using Nix, which laughs at everything else (but damn, the overall UX is still even more hostile than git).
I like mise a lot, but only use it for project specific tool management, JDK versions, etc.
I tried to use it for system wide things, but found it didn't work as well for me with things that I wanted to just be tools where I didn't care what specific version it was as long as it was more or less current, Helix, NeoVim, RipGrep, etc.
I recently found mise and have become a fan as well. I have used asdf for about a decade and it supports the same .tool-versions files so initially I used it for those exact same things.
But I use four different computers for development regularly and sometimes use Codespaces as well. While syncing dotfiles handles most of my setup, it doesn't handle binary dependencies of my dotfiles - my neovim setup wants fd & rg etc. So now those go in the mise global config. I also have a global node & python along with uv@latest which pretty much covers every tool I might want to install.
I have never cared for the fact that homebrew tries to maintain shared dependencies and several upgrades have broken stuff for me.
For system-wide things I usually use "latest" but it's nice being able to downgrade and/or stick to a working version using lockfiles. I remember back when I used Homebrew, Teleport shipped a bug that prevented me from accessing our servers and downgrading was a pain.
mise kind of supports dependencies, just not in the way people expect coming from any other package manager. The dependencies in mise are not automatic and all of them need to be manually defined. They're to get around ordering issues since mise installs in parallel, e.g.: if you use "pipx:black" you need to wait for python to finish installing. (This is the "depends" option on tools")
This is intentional as mise is not intended to be a full bootstrapping solution in the way homebrew/nix is, mise is designed to be an overlay on top of existing systems. So if you want to manage python with brew and black with mise it basically just works without extra configuration. I think this design decision has paid off in spades. It sounds like a drawback but at the end of the day it's probably the #1 reason users find mise easy to use.
Mise actually does support a primitive dependency system, you can specify package deps in your config, so, for example, you can ensure erlangs are installed before elixirs (bad example, elixir is already internally dependent on erlangs, but you get the idea)
Hmm, `mise use -g docker-cli` works for me. `docker compose` is a bit trickier – it gets installed as `docker-cli-plugin-docker-compose`, but docker-cli doesn’t seem to pick it up. I’ve added a symlink as `docker-compose` for the time being.
Also using brew for casks, and I think there’s a couple tools I couldn’t install with mise (e.g. pngpaste and zbar for scanning QR codes from screenshots).
There's the rename-exe option in mise.toml to rename the docker compose binary to `docker-compose`. I've used it on some machine, I think. Look it up in the docs, it doesn't take long to wire up.
The default docker-compose definition comes from aqua:docker/compose though, which does not support rename_exe. You have to specify github:docker/compose instead.
Nope :-( Just tried it again, it installs and is available in PATH as `docker-cli-plugin-docker-compose`, but `docker compose` says “unknown command”. For docker-cli to pick it up, it should be in $DOCKER_CONFIG/cli-plugins/docker-compose (~/.docker by default, though I use ~/.config/docker).
rename_exe doesn’t do anything on the aqua backend either (and isn’t a documented option). I’m on mise 2026.5.10 right now though so if you fixed something recently I might be missing out!
Mise’s refusal to make global packages globally available is off-putting. I keep using it for specific Node versions and the integration with fnox.
The big drawback: having Claude complain every couple of hours that the new worktree is untrusted; or having to prefix a bunch of commands with `mise exec …` is annoying as well. A global alias for all shells would be nice.
What do you mean by that? If you have mise activate set up correctly in your shell rc file, globally installed tools are available in every shell. There’s also shim mode [1].
I use Claude on a mise-powered project daily without any issues
Not an expert, but Claude doesn’t seem to be running with my ZSH profile? Really, anything that isn’t a terminal and tries to use global commands, such as utilities that expect Node to be available and so on. I always have to prefix commands, unless using the terminal myself.
Mise has two ways of running tools: the default one is ad-hoc PATH modifications, but there's also a shim folder you can add to PATH globally. If you mean the Claude desktop app or IDE plugin, the shim option is usually required, just edit the PATH the app is using (or the system-wide one).
You can also tell Claude to either run everything mise x or refresh its shell and it will do the zsh re-exec and that reloads the mise shims consistently.
Resolves that trust issue right away and is scoped to your repo (not global). We also have a make setup that helps the folks still doing make things get all setup and trusted on the main work tree.
At a past job we had a local `doctor` script that did this.
100% agree. They are complimentary. Brew handles specific things far better and mise handle polygot and some things where many versions need to been handled on the same system.
Mise installs itself as a static binary actually (but it's of course packaged in many registries), and while there are some third party registries it delegates to for some packages (aqua, asfd), most stuff I have installed is either built-in, or from PyPI, npm or GitHub, i.e. directly published by the upstream maintainers. More info: https://mise.jdx.dev/dev-tools/backends/
There's always the chicken/egg problem of which dependency manager to install first, though. AFAIK there's no "trusted" installed for Homebrew on macOS though I might be wrong.
Mise also has a task runner which automatically uses correct tools. Onboarding a new team member is super easy now, they just need Mise, "mise install" and they're up.
We're discussing Homebrew now, which includes discussing alternatives, and I'm telling my story of switching to a tool that I found better for my purposes. I'm not affiliated or anything. I agree this comment would be weird e.g. on the official Homebrew blog.
I agree, but HN doesn't like metacomments that just complain on how an article/comment is being upvoted, hence you being downvoted. See guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Funnily Mise does not support dependencies, and I was quite surprised that it mostly doesn't matter, as either pnpm/uv handles that, or it's a static binary that just works. In the past, had the unfortunate experience of packaging a Python application for Homebrew (the ridiculous process involved importing around 50 dependencies as "resources", building every single one from source or manually checking if it's already on Homebrew, declaring build toolchains for 5 different programming languages as dependencies, waiting over an hour for CI to finish on every update, then an upstream update introduced a "build-time dependency loop" and the project suddenly became unpackable for Homebrew) so I totally get why Mise took the "easy way out" and just relies on language-specific package managers directly.
Only thing from my Brewfile that I couldn't replace was the Docker CLI (needed to interact with Colima). And I still use Homebrew for casks. I encourage others to experiment with their dev setups, there are some amazing new tools out there.