Keeping up with IDEs and Virtual Environments...

[deanhystad]

You cannot have a virtual environment without a Python interpreter. A virtual environment is nothing more than the Python interpreter and the installed packages. Your project is not really part of the virtual environment. Your Python project uses the virtual environment instead of the system Python.

When working with virtual environments, the steps are:
- create a virtual environment
- use pip to install the Python interpreter as well as the required modules

Missing a step. You need to activate the virtual environment before using pip to install packages.
Correction. You don't use pip to install Python. You can use pip to install the tool used to create virtual environments, but you never pip Python. You can also make virtual environments without using pip at all.

b) How do we then use our IDE of preference(assuming we have several on our computer) to write scripts that will use the Python interpreter and modules living inside the virtual environment? Do we launch the IDE and and activate the specific virtual environment from it?

Your scripts are not part of the virtual environment unless you installed them. For example, you could pip install some scripts into your environment

pip install -e folder_containing_scripts

But mostly you use a virtual environment to configure the things your program will use, and you use project layout to "install" the files you are working on. Think of the venv as being mostly static, and you project as having all the stuff that changes.

c) Anytime we download an IDE (PyCharm, Thonny, Jupyter, etc.) are we automatically downloading another Python interpreter?

IDE's do not include Python. You need to tell an IDE which Python to use. If you tell it to use a virtual environment, it will use that as your Python. I have not used Jupyter. Don't forget VSCode which is my favorite IDE.

Virtual environments are not tied to an IDE. You can use a virtual environment without any IDE. You can use the same virtual environment for multiple projects. You can use different IDE's and have them using the same virtual environment.