Checklist

• I added a descriptive title
• I searched open requests and couldn't find a duplicate

What is the idea?

conda config can be used to configure an activated environment with conda config --env .... I believe this is a cool feature of conda. However, as I said the environment needs to be activated which poses some problem, I think, when conda is controlled programmatically through its command-line interface as you need to fiddle with the shell (I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this point!).

Adding --name/-n to conda config means that it would no longer be required to activate the environment to configure it. It would also make conda's CLI more consistent, as --name/-n is an option of conda create/install/update/remove(and more?).

Why is this needed?

The HoloViz group has a developer tool called pyctdev that is meant to be a unified interface for managing a Python project (e.g. doit test_unit, doit build_package, doit build_docs, ...). The user can either choose conda or pip as their dependency manager, i.e. pyctdev knows how to parse and convert the dependencies listed in a setup.py file so that they can be installed with conda. We're trying to see how we can improve this tool and being able to configure an environment without activating it would be a cool feature.

What should happen?

No response

Additional Context

I tried to look for related issues but looking for conda config just returns hundred of issues, sorry if this is a duplicate!