I don’t like using pip freeze in my projects since it has low signal to noise ratio not showing what actual dependencies are.

But elegant solution exists! I put all my dependencies to requirements.txt without versions specified and then invoke:

pip freeze > pip_freeze.txt
grep -Fx -f requirements.txt pip_freeze.txt > nice_requirements.txt

Explanation

First line saves all known requirements to file with versions.

Second line filters only manually entered requirements from that huge list, leaving only significant packages and their versions. It is done using grep with following parameters

-F, –fixed-strings
Interpret PATTERN as a list of fixed strings, separated by newlines, any of which is to be matched
-x, –line-regexp
Select only those matches that exactly match the whole line
-f FILE
Obtain patterns from FILE, one per line. The empty file contains zero patterns, and therefore matches nothing

Result

Effectively you get from this:

PyYAML
requests
result

to this

PyYAML==5.1.2
requests==2.22.0
result==0.3.0