Comment by SOLAR_FIELDS

Short answer probably not. You can get most of the way there with nix + direnv. But nix is a complex beast even if you’re only using that little subset of it. I watched the development of this flox tool for a few months now, to me it seems closest to vanilla nix that still gives a nice UX. With devenv there seems to be more guardrails but also more proprietary flavor (the under the hood constructs are not entirely just raw nix)