docs/source/faq/installation.md
(different-versions)=
Manim was originally created by Grant Sanderson as a personal project and for use in his YouTube channel, 3Blue1Brown. As his channel gained popularity, many grew to like the style of his animations and wanted to use manim for their own projects. However, as manim was only intended for personal use, it was very difficult for other users to install and use it.
In late 2019, Grant started working on faster OpenGL rendering in a new branch,
known as the shaders branch. In mid-2020, a group of developers forked it into what is
now the community edition; this is the version documented on this website.
In early 2021, Grant merged the shaders branch back into master, making it the default branch in his repository -- and this is what manimgl is.
The old version, before merging the shaders branch is sometimes referred to as
ManimCairo and is, at this point, only useful for one singular purpose: rendering
Grant's old videos locally on your machine. It is still available in his GitHub
repository in form of the cairo-backend branch.
To summarize:
manim.manimgl.manimgl. The latest version
of it is available on PyPI as manimlib,
but note that if you intend to use it to compile some old project of Grant,
you will likely have to install the exact version from the time the project
was created from source.We recommend the community maintained version especially for beginners. It has been developed to be more stable, better tested and documented (!), and quicker to respond to community contributions. It is also perfectly reasonable to start learning with the community maintained version and then switch to a different version later on.
If you do not care so much about documentation or stability, and would like to use the exact same version that Grant is using, then use ManimGL.
And as mentioned above, ManimCairo should only be used for (re)rendering old 3Blue1Brown projects (basically 2019 and before).
You can! The thing that usually gives it away is the import statement
at the top of the file; depending on how the code imports Manim you can tell
for which version of the code it was written for:
manim (i.e., from manim import *, import manim as mn, etc.),
then the code you are reading is supposed to be run with the community maintained version.import manimlib (or from manimlib import *), you are likely
reading a file to be rendered with ManimGL.from manimlib.imports import *, or perhaps even
from big_ol_pile_of_manim_imports import * you are reading a snippet that is
supposed to be rendered with an early, or very early version of ManimCairo, respectively.Assuming you can run manim in your terminal and there is some output, check the
first line of the text being produced. If you are using the community maintained
version, the first line of any output will be Manim Community <version number>.
If it does not say that, you are likely using ManimGL.
You can also check the list of packages you have installed: if typing python
in your terminal spawns the interpreter that corresponds to the Python
installation you use (might also be py, or python3, depending on your
operating system), running python -m pip list will print a list of all
installed packages. Check whether manim or manimgl appear in that list.
Similarly, you can use python -m pip install <package name> and
python -m pip uninstall <package name> to install and uninstall
packages from that list, respectively.
It is only natural that there are many video guides on installing Manim out there, given that Manim is a library used for creating videos. Unfortunately however, (YouTube) videos can't be updated easily (without uploading a new one, that is) when some step in the installation process changes, and so there are many severely outdated resources out there.
This is why we strongly recommend following our
{doc}written installation guide </installation> to guide you through the process.
In case you prefer using a video guide regardless, please check whether the
creator whose guide you have been watching has made a more recent version available,
and otherwise please contact them directly. Asking for help in the community will
likely lead to being suggested to follow our written guide.
pip install manim?This most likely means that pip was not able to use our pre-built wheels
of the manimpango dependency. Let us know (via
Discord or by opening a
new issue on GitHub)
which architecture you would like to see supported, and we'll see what we
can do about it.
To fix errors when installing manimpango, you need to make sure you
have all the necessary build requirements. Check out the detailed
instructions given in the BUILDING section
of ManimPango's README.
(not-on-path)=
X is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch fileIf you have followed {doc}our local installation instructions </installation/uv> and
have not activated the corresponding virtual environment, make sure to use uv run manim ...
instead of just manim (or activate the virtual environment by following the instructions
printed when running uv venv).
Otherwise there is a problem with the directories where your system is looking for
executables (the PATH variable).
If python is recognized, you can try running
commands by prepending python -m. That is, manim becomes python -m manim,
and pip becomes python -m pip.
Otherwise see
this StackExchange answer
to get help with editing the PATH variable manually.
choco install manimce) to install Manim, but it failed!Make sure that you were running the command with administrator permissions,
otherwise there can be problems. If this is not the issue, read Chocolatey's
output carefully, it should mention a .log file containing information why
the process failed.
You are welcome to take this file (and any other input you feel might be
relevant) and submit it to Manim's community to ask for help with
your problem. See the {doc}FAQ on getting help </faq/help> for instructions.
python or python3 the Windows store is opened, can I fix this?Yes: you can remove these aliases with these steps:
python and/or python3).ImportError mentioning that some Symbol is not found.This is because Anaconda environments come with their own preinstalled
version of cairo which is not compatible with the version of pycairo
required by Manim. Usually it can be fixed by running
conda install -c conda-forge pycairo
manimpango/cmanimpango.c could not be found when trying to install Manim?This occasionally happens when your system has to build a wheel for ManimPango locally because there is no compatible version for your architecture available on PyPI.
Very often, the problem is resolved by installing Cython (e.g., via
pip3 install Cython) and then trying to reinstall Manim. If this
does not fix it:
Getting Help FAQs </faq/help>.