My above example wasn't running the command, just defining it to be run manually. The .env becomes a dumping ground for all sorts of project specific stuff. The docs say direnv doesn't support this.

> Also one thing it does that your hand-rolled version does not is that it remembers what the environment variables were before and restores them to that state when you exit the directory.

I've thought of adding this, but apart from a couple of things I reset manually I haven't really found the need.

You're right, you can't define aliases/functions using direnv. That's a shame, that does seem useful.