How to set default PyCharm interpreter?

Question

My PyCharm installation has two interpreters available:

• Python 3.3.2 (/usr/bin/python3.3m)
• Python 2.7.5 (/usr/bin/python2.7)

Whenever I

Answer 1

I am using a Mac and I found that on the splash screen there were messages saying that one of the xml files in

/Library/Preferences/PyCharm2017.3/options/

could not be loaded. As a result a new one was created. When I looked at the files in this directory I found a number of the files were corrupted in some way and could not be viewed. I renamed all these to .OLD, restarted PyCharm and reset the defaults to the system interpreter in my case. This fixed my problem and PyCharm now defaults to the system interpreter.