Thanks. I understand this a lot more now that I've learned about venvs, and I'm between VScode and emacs for editing. No longer would I install a editor which depends on the same environment as the code I want to run.
As for Spyder, it is included in the default Windows install of Anaconda (and linked to by the default Anaconda Navigator). As a new user doing package management via the GUI, it was not clear at all that Spyder was sharing dependencies with my project until things started breaking.
Anaconda was also half-baked in other ways: it broke if the Windows username contains UTF-8 characters, so I ended up creating a new Windows user just for that ML work. PITA.
As for Spyder, it is included in the default Windows install of Anaconda (and linked to by the default Anaconda Navigator). As a new user doing package management via the GUI, it was not clear at all that Spyder was sharing dependencies with my project until things started breaking.
Anaconda was also half-baked in other ways: it broke if the Windows username contains UTF-8 characters, so I ended up creating a new Windows user just for that ML work. PITA.