Develop Kivy apps on Mac OS X with Pycharm

Note: Recent versions of (either/both) Pycharm & Kivy (Pycharm 3.0 & Kivy 1.8.0 at least) have changed so that /usr/local/bin/kivy, which is (now?) a shell script that executes your default python, can not be used as a python interpreter within Pycharm

If you're a Mac-based Pycharm python developer, it may see like you can't use it to develop using the Kivy framework, due to there being no official support -- but setting up Pycharm as a Kivy IDE is very easy, once you realize that

/usr/local/bin/kivy ~= /usr/bin/python

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Ok, let's do this!

After installing Kivy.app on your mac:

1. Preferences > Project Interpreter > Python Interpreters

Create a virtualenv. I couldn't figure out how to make it directly, so I made on from 2.7.1 and then edited it. I tried navigating to /usr/local/bin/kivy when I needed to choose the interpreter, but it didn't work.

Edit Python Interpreter

Name: Kivy

Interpreter Path: /usr/local/bin/kivy

It doesn't really matter what you name it. It just matters that you know which virtualenv is where.

Kivy is already its own virtualenv/custom python distribution (type the kivy cmd in a terminal, it's a python shell), so pycharm needs to look at /usr/local/bin/kivy instead of /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin/python (or whatever) for code inspections, libraries, eggs, etc.

Note that you must have run the make-symlinks script that came with the Kivy.app installer for this to work. If you didn't/can't run make-symlinks, try changing the path to kivy to /Applications/Kivy.app/Contents/Resources/script

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2. Make sure Kivy is your project interpreter

After you create the kivy interpreter, set it as your kivy project interpreter in Preferences > Project Interpreter.

Apply and Ok, and confirm that the skeletons generate (or at least mostly, I had some errors) and that your project looks a bit like this:

Note that my python system library is horribly polluted, so if yours is clean it will look different.

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3. Add .kv support

You can save the below XML file to this directory: ~/Library/Preferences/PyCharm20/filetypes/

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<filetype binary="false" default_extension="" description="Kivy " name="Kivy Files">
  <highlighting>
    <options>
      <option name="LINE_COMMENT" value="#" />
      <option name="COMMENT_START" value="" />
      <option name="COMMENT_END" value="" />
      <option name="HEX_PREFIX" value="" />
      <option name="NUM_POSTFIXES" value="" />
      <option name="HAS_BRACES" value="true" />
      <option name="HAS_BRACKETS" value="true" />
      <option name="HAS_PARENS" value="true" />
      <option name="HAS_STRING_ESCAPES" value="true" />
    </options>
    <keywords keywords="@;Canvas;Label;Rectangle;app;canvas;root;self" ignore_case="false" />
    <keywords2 keywords="center_x;center_y;font_size;id;pos;size;source;text;top" />
    <keywords3 keywords="on_press" />
    <keywords4 keywords="*args;ctx" />
  </highlighting>
  <extensionMap>
    <mapping ext="kv" />
  </extensionMap>
</filetype>

I made it pretty quickly, it's missing a lot but at least it will color a lot of the main words. Feel free to improve it and re-share.

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4. Add a Run Config

Make a run config like normal, just make sure the Kivy interpter is selected so that pycharm will use /usr/local/bin/kivy instead of your standard python (/usr/bin/python or whatever)