Use Vim with virtualenv

Question

I do a lot of Python and I use almost all the time a virtualenv along with virtualenvwrapper to keep my modules organised.

But when I want to use those plugin from inside vim, through an external command, it seems that the shell is not aware of that config.

I need to have access to the virtualenv because

e.g.

(venv) $ python
>> import simple_history
>> # OK here

(venv) $ vim
:!python 
>> import simple_history
ImportError: No module named simple_history

My shell is shell=/bin/zsh, I guess I need to use this setting to access my virtualenv, but I can't figure out how...

Answer 1

I actually fixed this myself a long time ago. The problem is that when you run !python you're starting up a new shell with your existing environment. But, this means workon xxxx wasn't called to actually activate the virtualenv. This lead to a lot of confusion for me since $VIRTUAL_ENV was set.

I got around it by adding the following to my ~/.zshenv script:

if [[ -n $VIRTUAL_ENV && -e "${VIRTUAL_ENV}/bin/activate" ]]; then
  source "${VIRTUAL_ENV}/bin/activate"
fi

Since ~/.zshenv is sourced within the current session, it's a pretty safe assumption that the $VIRTUAL_ENV wasn't activated. Now when you run !python in Vim, it should use the virtualenv interpreter. You can confirm this by running :echo system('which python').