I use the PyCharm community edition for python development sometimes, but recently when I launch it, it shows a dialog and then exits like a flash. I was confused with this for some time. And now I found how to fix it, I will share the solution in this post.
1. How To Fix PyCharm Cannot Start Steps.
- My OS is macOS, but the steps are similar to Windows and Linux OS.
- Open a macOS Finder, click the Applications item on the left side.
- Find the PyCharm CE icon on the right side, right-click it, and click the Show Package Contents menu item in the popup menu list. Then it will display the PyCharm CE app content in the macOS Finder window.
- Expand the MacOS folder in the /Applications/PyCharm CE.app folder. There is a file which name is pycharm.
- If you want to go to the /Applications/PyCharm CE.app folder in the terminal by command line, you should add two single quotes to the PyCharm CE.app folder like this /Applications/’PyCharm CE.app’
$ cd /Applications/'PyCharm CE.app' $ pwd /Applications/PyCharm CE.app
- Or you should add a backslash before the white space in the folder path like below.
$ cd /Applications/PyCharm\ CE.app $ pwd /Applications/PyCharm CE.app
- Open a terminal and drag the file /Applications/PyCharm CE.app/Contents/MacOS/pycharm from the macOS Finder window to the terminal, press Enter key on the keyboard then you will get the below output.
$ /Applications/PyCharm\ CE.app/Contents/MacOS/pycharm 2021-03-03 18:37:06.575 pycharm[3733:100354] allVms required 1.8*,1.8+ 2021-03-03 18:37:06.583 pycharm[3733:100360] Current Directory: /Users/songzhao 2021-03-03 18:37:06.584 pycharm[3733:100360] Value of PYCHARM_VM_OPTIONS is (null) 2021-03-03 18:37:06.584 pycharm[3733:100360] Processing VMOptions file at /Users/songzhao/Library/Application Support/JetBrains/PyCharmCE2020.3/pycharm.vmoptions 2021-03-03 18:37:06.585 pycharm[3733:100360] Done OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM warning: Option UseConcMarkSweepGC was deprecated in version 9.0 and will likely be removed in a future release. Error opening zip file or JAR manifest missing : /Applications/PyCharm.app/Contents/bin/jetbrains-agent.jar Error occurred during initialization of VM agent library failed to init: instrument
- From the above output, we can see the error has occurred when processing the VMOptions file at /Users/songzhao/Library/Application Support/JetBrains/PyCharmCE2020.3/pycharm.vmoptions
- Open a macOS Finder window, click Go —> Go to Folder… menu item and input the folder path /Users/songzhao/Library/Application Support/JetBrains/PyCharmCE2020.3 in the popup dialog input text box, then click the Go button.
- Find the pycharm.vmoptions file in the above folder and move it to trash.
- You can also run the below command to go to the above folder in a terminal and remove the pycharm.vmoptions file.
$ cd /Users/songzhao/Library/Application\ Support/JetBrains/PyCharmCE2020.3 $ ls -l total 16 drwxr-xr-x 3 songzhao staff 96 Mar 3 14:35 codestyles drwxr-xr-x 4 songzhao staff 128 Mar 3 14:35 eval drwxr-xr-x 3 songzhao staff 96 Mar 3 14:35 event-log-whitelist -rw-r--r-- 1 songzhao staff 81 Mar 3 14:35 migrate.config drwxr-xr-x 20 songzhao staff 640 Mar 3 14:35 options -rw-r--r-- 1 songzhao staff 0 Mar 3 14:34 port.lock -rw-r--r-- 1 songzhao staff 590 Mar 3 14:35 pycharm.vmoptions drwxr-xr-x 6 songzhao staff 192 Mar 3 14:35 tasks drwxr-xr-x 4 songzhao staff 128 Mar 3 14:35 workspace $ rm -rf ./pycharm.vmoptions
- Now you can start the PyCharm CE version successfully by clicking the PyCharm CE app icon in the Applications folder or by executing the command $ /Applications/PyCharm\ CE.app/Contents/MacOS/pycharm in a terminal command line.
