curious, what makes it better? asdf has always just worked for me, but this is the first time i’ve heard of mise, so i’m wondering what i’m potentially missing out on

Maybe it works better with tmux?

The mise docs have a great comparison page: https://mise.jdx.dev/dev-tools/comparison-to-asdf.html

In personal experience, all of these have held true. Mise is just easier to use than asdf and I don't have to `asdf -h` every time I have to use it. The performance is significantly better and I can use mise exec in shebangs without sacrificing too much startup time. And it's easier to install because it's a SLSE. I wouldn't say it's worth deliberately switching from asdf (though I would, because asdf's CLI is an endless annoyance to me), but if you're on a new machine I don't think there is a reason to use asdf over mise.

Anyone who wants "nodejs latest:20" in their .tool-versions file is probably confused. The point of .tool-versions is to pin a particular version in your source control so you know your whole team is on the same version in that branch. Getting the latest revision whenever you install means pointless drift.

Are you really sensitive to the minor/patch versions of node? I don't think it should make a difference whether you're using 20.9 or 20.12, and to me to that would be a bigger red flag.

Either way, I don't think many people are checking in tool-versions files. Most JS templates specify a range of node versions they work on and leave it to you to specify which one. I don't think this is unusual for most other languages I use, like ruby.

No, I’m not generally sensitive to a point release but it’s pointless to allow drift anyway. I have had point revisions of docker containers break CI pipelines before and it’s unpleasant.