Support showing `--prompt` name as environment interpreter name in Python and Notebook

[thomasaarholt]

The directory containing a virtual environment is often named .venv. This is the name that is by default shown in modern terminal prompts when the environment is active. This makes it difficult to identify which .venv is currently active.

Python virtual environments support a feature called prompt, which is essentially a nickname for the environment.

I would like for VSCode Python and Jupyter notebooks to support showing the prompt name in the "Select Interpreter" dialogue.

From the python venv docs

 --prompt PROMPT       Provides an alternative prompt prefix for this
                       environment.

Here is how you add a prompt label to the virtual environment:
python -m venv --prompt "foobar" .venv (creates a virtual environment nicknamed "foobar" in a directory called .venv)
(Similar approaches exist for uv and poetry as well)

After activation, the environment is now shown as "foobar", rather than ".venv" (here using starship prompt):

How it looks now

If I open the directory in VSCode and call Select Interpreter, I get these options:

What I would like

I would like foobar to replace the .venv in the highlighted area in the option list.

[karthiknadig]

For implementation this can be extracted from:

[karthiknadig]

Created microsoft/python-environment-tools#191 to track this on tooling side.

• use prompt form pyvenv.cfg as name for venv python-environment-tools#191

[karthiknadig]

A temporary solution until this is available from pet is to extract this name from pyvenv.cfg ourselves.