How To | Run IDLE for Python3 on Mac

Run IDLE for Python3 on a Mac

Homebrew rules …

Python IDLE

Python comes with a great debugging tool called IDLE. Though it does come installed with Python3 there could be a hoop or two to jump through to get it working on your Mac. Here we will discuss the simple installation and execution process for Python’s IDLE.

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First, let’s install python3. Note that idle3 will also be installed to the system during this step.

If you have already installed Python, then you can skip this step.

> brew install python3

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Next, let’s see where Homebrew installed everything.

Homebrew installs most of the executables it installs to /opt/homebrew/bin. And as you can see, that’s where we can find the python3 executable.

> which python3
/opt/homebrew/bin/python3

And guess what? We can also find the idle3 executable there as well.

> which idle3
/opt/homebrew/bin/idle3

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Moving forward, I ended up creating an alias so I can launch idle3 fairly quickly from the cli. Here’s how to set that piece up.

> grep idle3 ~/.bash_alias
alias idle='/opt/homebrew/bin/idle3'

> source ~/.bash_alias

Now let’s try running it.

Wait … we get an error! We’ll fix that in the next step.

> idle
** IDLE can't import Tkinter.
Your Python may not be configured for Tk. **

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Now, we are missing the Tkinter library required by IDLE to run. Let’s install that dependency with … drum roll please … yes Homebrew!

> brew install python-tk
...
==> Installing python-tk@3.12 dependency: tcl-tk
==> Downloading https://ghcr.io/v2/homebrew/core/tcl-tk/manifests/8.6.14
Already downloaded: /Users/steve/Library/Caches/Homebrew/downloads/0e0bf7bf267ffebaf93f7073e662653e2e6b892f68642d8ca120d6134d2c5eb9--tcl-tk-8.6.14.bottle_manifest.json
==> Pouring tcl-tk--8.6.14.arm64_sonoma.bottle.tar.gz
🍺  /opt/homebrew/Cellar/tcl-tk/8.6.14: 3,065 files, 53.2MB
==> Installing python-tk@3.12
==> Pouring python-tk@3.12--3.12.5.arm64_sonoma.bottle.tar.gz
🍺  /opt/homebrew/Cellar/python-tk@3.12/3.12.5: 6 files, 157.8KB
==> Running `brew cleanup python-tk@3.12`... 

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Success!

Now when we attempt to run IDLE, it should all be working.

> idle

IDLE Shell

Conclusion

That’s all there is to it! Thankfully it’s pretty simple to get it working fairly quickly. Homebrew takes care of pretty much all of it for you. And that’s my kind of tool.

Thank You!!