[hyeonwho4]

Thanks. I understand this a lot more now that I've learned about venvs, and I'm between VScode and emacs for editing. No longer would I install a editor which depends on the same environment as the code I want to run.

As for Spyder, it is included in the default Windows install of Anaconda (and linked to by the default Anaconda Navigator). As a new user doing package management via the GUI, it was not clear at all that Spyder was sharing dependencies with my project until things started breaking.

Anaconda was also half-baked in other ways: it broke if the Windows username contains UTF-8 characters, so I ended up creating a new Windows user just for that ML work. PITA.