Problem description

This is related to our needs for education (see #3517) (though I would also use this for scientific research).

Let's consider that people get a pixi workspace directory with files pixi.toml and pixi.lock. They don't know well Pixi and just want to use the environment.

Currently to use that they need to run something like

cd /path/to/workspace/dir
pixi shell
cd /path/to/my/stuff

It would be very convenient to be able to just run from anywhere

pixi shell -p /path/to/workspace/dir

(I choose -p like project but I don't care about this letter. Anything simple and understandable by newbies would be fine.)

This seems as a small change but it would help a lot!

Moreover, the documentation https://pixi.sh/latest/reference/cli/pixi/shell/#global-options is wrong. It says that

--manifest-path <MANIFEST_PATH> The path to pixi.toml, pyproject.toml, or the workspace directory

I interpret this thinking that it could be possible to run

pixi shell --manifest-path /path/to/workspace/dir

but it does not work and prints

  × Is a directory (os error 21)