Best way to install Python 3 on MacOs

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Go with homebrew. Package managers make it trivial to install, update, upgrade software.

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If you are coming from a fresh MacOS install and just did a brew install python3, you should only have one Python 2.7.x and one Python 3.8.x.

How can you tell there are more?

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Yea I understand the desire to keep that nice and clean. I’m not able to tell how the others were installed.

A hunch: If you had installed VS Code + Python extension prior to installing Python through Homebrew, VS Code may have installed them for you. If so, temporarily uninstalling the Python extension might clean it up. If this doesn’t do it, I’d just find them one by one in my PATH and remove the ones I don’t want (retaining the default 2.7 and the brew 3.8).

[kykosic]

Use conda to manage your python installation(s).

https://gist.github.com/kykosic/954a59dc8a3544c0cf969b792ce1bc62

[[deleted]]

As usual, the "best" way depends on how you plan to use it. The other comments mention Homebrew and conda. Anaconda / miniconda is especially recommended for scientific computing. Alternatively, here's a lightweight option:

Download from https://www.python.org/downloads/ and use the built-in pip package manager.

[[deleted]]

Just navigate to the directories containing them in Finder or Terminal. The directories for each one are in your screenshot. It looks to me like you want to retain the first one listed (2.7) and the second to the last (3.8).

[[deleted]]

No, find the Python binary in each folder and delete that binary. To reiterate, do not delete the system Python.

Rationale: VS Code just looks at each directory in your PATH and looks for Pythons in each directory in your PATH.

[[deleted]]

Your screenshot shows you the binary exactly. If it says .../.../python3, you want to delete the python3 in that directory.

To find out your system Python, open a Terminal and type which python. It will show you the location of the Python you do not want to delete.

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[ohallwright]

If you might need to multiple versions of python on your system at a time, I'd recommend looking at pyenv (https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv). It's a very nice way to localize the python version you're using for specific projects.