Manim: common issues on Windows with PyCharm

Jupyter Notebook not rendering Manim animations in PyCharm

PyCharm does not support rendering .mp4 files in Jupyter Notebooks. To work around this issue, you can use the --format webm option when running Manim, which will generate .webm files that can be rendered in PyCharm’s Jupyter Notebook:

1
2%%manim --format webm -ql IntroScene
3
4class IntroScene(Scene):
5    def construct(self):
6        num12345 = MathTex(r"12345")

Tex not rendering

LaTeX requies an extra package to be installed on Windows. You can install it using the following command:

1winget install -i MiKTeX.MiKTeX

Summary

Manim (in fact, only Jupyter support) is really bad inside PyCharm. If you want to use Manim, I recommend using it in a different environment, such as Jupyter Notebook in VS Code, or writing Manim code in PyCharm as a regular Python script and running it from the command line.

Update

After running Manim in VS Code for a while, I have to say that initially experience was much better than in PyCharm, but after a while I started missing PyCharm’s productivity features and general IDE experience. So I switched back to PyCharm and I have to say that it’s not that bad after all. I don’t use Jupyter, just plain Python scripts, and I run video generation from the command line.

For heavy scenes, I had issues with VS Code’s manim-sideview extension, because it is using default 1080p rendering, which can be slow comparing to -ql. I know it can be configured, but I found it extremely unstable. The extension also just spawns webviews and crunches CPU via fucking with JavaScript, so it had to die.