Thank you! Yes, I'm already using the -c 'source xxx; command' approach
with Bash/fish, and you are right, it should work with Zsh too of course.
Nonetheless, the problem of starting Zsh with an activated virtual
environment remains.

I suppose the next question is if the maintainers would consider adding
this feature to Zsh to support use cases like these, just as Bash/fish do
(which is why I thought writing to zsh-workers instead of zsh-users was
perhaps going to be more appropriate).

Best,
Gergely

On Mon, Feb 13, 2023 at 12:24 PM Roman Perepelitsa <
roman.perepelitsa@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 13, 2023 at 11:58 AM Kalmár Gergely <kgregory89@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > I was wondering if there is an equivalent to Bash's --init-file
> > option or fish shell's --init-command option in Zsh or if one can
> > hack around to achieve the same effect. I would need to be able to
> > source a virtual environment activation file after the Zsh startup
> > files were processed (but before a command is executed) in order to
> > be able to start a shell or run commands inside a Python virtual
> > environment.
>
> If you are executing a script or a command, then instead of this:
>
>     zsh foo
>     zsh -c 'foo'
>
> you can do this:
>
>     zsh -c 'source /path/to/your/file; foo'
>
> If you need to start an interactive zsh that sources an extra file
> after the usual startup files, and if you cannot modify any of the
> standard startup files, then https://github.com/romkatv/zshi or
> something like it is the only option. Disclaimer: It's my project but
> I'm not using this code myself.
>
> P.S.
>
> This question is more suitable for zsh-users than zsh-workers.
>