Unable to remove old interpreters from Pycharm

Question

When I go to Preferences | Python Interpreter | Show All... (as described here ) and try to remove an old interpreter, it seems to be successfully removed.

If I close and reopen only the Project Interpreters popup window it seems to have saved my changes, but when I close and reopen the Preferences window the interpreters are still there.

This happens regardless of whether I access the preferences window from an open project or not, so it shouldn't be a project-specific issue.

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The interpreters I'm trying to remove are for old projects that don't exist anymore (as in the path to the project including the python binary has been deleted).

How can I remove these unused interpreters?

Bonus: what should I do in the future when I delete a project to ensure this doesn't happen?

Answer 1

Correct Answer

Looking at the logs, there was an error when trying to remove that said Configuration.PythonSdkDetailsDialog - Please specify a different SDK name

It turns out that I had a duplicate interpreter elsewhere in the interpreter list. Removing the duplicate (normally, using the minus button) and reopening the preferences window did the trick.

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Old Answer

Here's what I ended up doing:

Using this link , I found my configuration directory. I that directory, there was a file at options/jdk.table.xml which contained a list of interpreters.

Manually deleting entries here did the trick.

This still feels wrong to me, though, so I welcome a better solution.