Before pip easy_install was the standard package manager for the Python Install Pip with easy_install On MacOS easy_install is a Python module bundled with setuptools which gives us the ability to download, build, install, and manage Python packages.
Generally, this is irrelevant for the Windows installations, because Python 2 is not automatically included with Windows, so you can use python to get to Python 3. So, you’ll generally want to type python3 on those machines as well. Mostly this also applies to the Macs in the lab as well. As far as I know, you cannot do this in IDLE. But as I mentioned in class, I prefer Terminal to IDLE myself, mostly due to the ability to use the “up-arrow” to retrieve previously typed commands. If you use IDLE in the Python 3.5 folder in your Applications folder, then you’ll be using Python 3. Then, when you want to start Python from the Terminal, start it with python3 (not python- python without the 3 will start Python 2 rather than Python 3).
If you are trying to install NLTK on your own Mac OS X computer, there are a couple of things that you might need to do differently from what the instructions given online tell you to do.Īs background, here’s the thing: Mac OS X comes with Python pre-installed, but it is an older version of Python than we want (it is Python 2, we want Python 3).