Symptom:

On macOS, the Canopy application opens correctly and displays the Welcome Screen. When clicking the Editor button to open a Canopy editor window, the application crashes.

Cause:

This issue is generally caused by interference from a 3rd party library, which was installed outside of the Canopy Package Manager or Enthought Deployment Manager system such as Homebrew or macports.

The most common cause of the issue is that the user has used Homebrew to install python, python3, or pygame (which in turn installs python/python3). One of the libraries installed in this process as a dependency of python/python3 is gdbm, the GNU database manager. This installation causes conflict with the Canopy system.

Solution(s):

1. The quick solution to this problem is to uninstall gdbm using whichever package manager was used to install it (Homebrew, macports, etc ...)

For example, uninstalling via Homebrew:

brew uninstall gdbm

or if that fails:

brew uninstall --force gdbm

2. If you have Homebrew installed but require the gdbm package to be installed then you may be able to downgrade gdbm. This issue only occurs with gdbm version 1.14 or higher installed via Homebrew. The versions listed below have been tested to work properly; copy one of the following urls and substitute it into the command below:

• gdbm 1.13: 

  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/6938c5e3ed0b91bd63de7035b5d5afb57b5942a4/Formula/gdbm.rb

• gdbm 1.12: 

  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/febb0fca0a28bf93502751f4671effabdecb55b4/Formula/gdbm.rb

• gdbm 1.11: 

  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/f4bd9ce4b511d7fb87f464865077112b4ef1a77f/Formula/gdbm.rb 

brew unlink gdbm && brew install <URL>