Some months ago I installed Anaconda for Mac. Within the package I use Spyder. Now, Spyder recently released a new version. It tells me that I can update it, but since I installed Spyder via Anaconda I must use Anaconda to update Spyder, otherwise I run into trouble with Spyder it tells me in the message.
Now if I go the file user/opt/anaconda3 and click on the icon Anaconda it tells me that the program Anaconda cannot be opened anymore. How come Spyder works while Anaconda does not anymore? I literally never touched Anaconda, so everything should be in "default", just as you download Anaconda from their homepage for Mac.
I usually open Spyder via terminal entering spyder and that still works perfectly fine. So my goal is to update Spyder and if possible make Anaconda work again.
Appreciate the help!
The Anaconda Distribution is a collection of software that includes among other things the conda package manager, the Spyder IDE, and Anaconda Navigator which is a graphical program launcher and front-end for conda.
If you've never created any new conda environments, then you're using the versions of Navigator and Spyder from your base environment, and you can update them using a conda command in the Terminal:
conda update -n base anaconda-navigator spyder
If this doesn't fix your issue with Navigator, I would suggest simply reinstalling the latest version of the Anaconda distribution. That shouldn't affect any of your work unless you've stored it inside one of the installation folders, or your code is incompatible with a newer version of one or more packages that you've used. However you should be able to update and use Spyder independently of Navigator if you're not bothered about Navigator.
If you are currently doing everything in the base environment though, I strongly suggest learning how to work with conda environments. The purpose of using environments is that you can maintain specific sets of packages and their dependencies - and even different Python versions - that you need for different projects, and update each environment independently of the others and of your base distribution. In this case it's also worth reading the sections of the Spyder documentation FAQ that relate to conda and Anaconda.