Mise as a Daily Version Manager

Mise, pronounced “MEEZ ahn plahs”, it’s a version manager of version managers. It became a structural part of my daily workflows as a software engineer.

Mise is capable of managing version across platforms, languages and projects, seamlessly. No shell hooks. No shims.

Ergonomics

Let’s compare mise with nvm (Node Version Manager):

autoload -U add-zsh-hook

load-nvmrc() {
  local nvmrc_path
  nvmrc_path="$(nvm_find_nvmrc)"

  if [ -n "$nvmrc_path" ]; then
    local nvmrc_node_version
    nvmrc_node_version=$(nvm version "$(cat "${nvmrc_path}")")

    if [ "$nvmrc_node_version" = "N/A" ]; then
      nvm install
    elif [ "$nvmrc_node_version" != "$(nvm version)" ]; then
      nvm use
    fi
  elif [ -n "$(PWD=$OLDPWD nvm_find_nvmrc)" ] && [ "$(nvm version)" != "$(nvm version default)" ]; then
    echo "Reverting to nvm default version"
    nvm use default
  fi
}

add-zsh-hook chpwd load-nvmrc
load-nvmrc

The above snippet comes directly from nvm documentation: https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm/blob/e4e34ec7f9500709f938e7d0188107741ace70e2/README.md?plain=1#L741C7-L761C5

this should be put in your ~/.zshrc, so every time you cd into an nodejs project, it will install and set it’s version as the current one for your shell.

With mise (after activation), the above task is as simple as:

mise use node@latest

Semantic

To know which tool version to use, mise will look for a mise.toml file in the current directory and its parents. Global configuration it’s stored at ~/.config/mise/config.toml and can look like this:

[tools]
bun = "latest"
node = "22"
usage = "latest"

[settings]
idiomatic_version_file_enable_tools = ["node"]

Configuration Hierarchy

An seen in their docs, mise supports nested configuration that cascades from broad to specific settings:

~/.config/mise/config.toml      # Global defaults
~/work/mise.toml                # Work-specific tools
~/work/project/mise.toml        # Project-specific overrides
~/work/project/.tool-versions   # Legacy asdf compatibility

Each level can override or extend the previous ones, giving you fine-grained control over tool versions across different contexts.

mise can be used as a drop-in replacement for asdf. It supports the same .tool-versions files that you may have used with asdf and can use asdf plugins through the asdf backend.

Users coming from asdf have generally found mise to just be a faster and simples asdf

Official tools

mise comes with some plugins built into the CLI written in Rust.

You can see the core plugins with mise registry -b core.

Tool	Install command
Bun	mise use -g bun@latest
Elixir	mise use -g erlang elixir
Java	mise use -g java@temurin
Swift	mise use -g swift
Node	mise use -g node@20
Zig	mise use -g zig@latest

Final Thoughts

Tools like mise make development more approachable. It’s a must have for any modern development setup and a great option to make on-boardings faster!.

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