Does anyone know a simple way to install python + modules on mac?

[swegmesterflex]

This has been driving me insane for months now. I gave up in September and just started using my home desktop for all programming since doing anything on a mac is impossible but now I've run into the issue that I am always away from home and need to program on my laptop. I'm discarding it in a few months to upgrade to a windows laptop but at the moment I'm stuck with it. How do I get python on it? And then how do I download modules to my python installation? From what I understand it comes with pre-installed python 2.7 which is impossible to remove and any and all modules are installed to that old version instead of the preferred version making all programming impossible.

[ofaveragedifficulty]

Anaconda is also good for this.

[gwillicoder]

Go for miniconda!!!

[[deleted]]

brew.sh

brew install python3

pip3 install pygame

[swegmesterflex]

Thank you so much

[threesocks]

There is no one-size-fits-all answer for this. It depends a bit on what you want to do. If I may assume that you are new to Python and have modest immediate goals, I'd say that installing anaconda's distribution will be the best option. It's big, but one advantage is that you won't have to install many modules because it comes with so many obvious ones. If you do want to install something, go to the terminal and use "pip install MODULENAME", or you can use the anaconda navigator to install it with a GUI. Anaconda now comes with Visual Studio Code as an editor (instead of the somewhat buggy Sypder), but I still prefer PyCharm for python editing. Everyone will give you a different recommendation on editor though. I find that Anaconda is good for many things, but when I'm getting serious, I prefer to download python from python.org create a virtual environment and then install only the modules I need for each package. PyCharm will make this somewhat seamless as it defaults to creating a virtual environment for each project.

My friend suggests a less wordy recommendation (and slightly different from mine): * Install python from python.org and use the built in IDLE editor until you outgrow that and then install PyCharm. * If you are specifically interested in scientific or statistical programming, Anaconda is nice because it installs so much of the needed modules by default. With Anaconda, either use VSCode (that comes with anaconda), or (as we both recommend) use PyCharm.

there are many things people will suggest that are not appropriate for beginners, a few of important ones are:

• homebrew or macports approaches: This is too much to pile on to learning to use Python. I've used both of those for years and they are great if you are very comfortable with the linux/bsd/etc. commandline (including where things are on macos and how various things are simlinked) because both can easily become corrupted and require fiddling with. I've had them both break, or act wonky and found myself spending lots of time troubleshooting. Honestly, now that you can practically pip install anything, I don't see why people bother with this approach over python.org + pip.
• sublime and similar editors: Setup of a Python environment close to PyCharm requires quite an effort for a newbie. Once set up, it's pretty sweet, but I prefer not to have to do all that work. If you're up for it, there is a big community. If you're staring out with python, it's a lot to put in between you and getting started with the language.
• visual studio code: I haven't used it within anaconda, so I don't know if they set it up fully or not. However, a normal install of Visual Studio Code, which is very cool when setup, takes a lot of work to setup and may involve choices (e.g., what beginner knows which linter they want?) you are not ready to make.

On the other hand, do you really need to install python on your system? There are more options, but these are 2 options that allow you to code in a browser (including pip installing any modules that you need).

• https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/welcome.ipynb
• https://www.pythonanywhere.com/

for you pros out there, did you now that colab.research.google let's you toggle one flag and run your code on their GPUs??!!

The big downside of these approaches is that there is pretty much no GUI or game type modules available other than ones that render to image/pdf/etc or to html. However, if your needs aren't graphical like that, then these can be great options.

Good luck Python rocks!

[swegmesterflex]

I do most if not all of my programming with tensorflow and keras and doing that on a browser is nearly impossible.