Here's how I installed pandoc on my MacBook Pro (13–inch, M1, 2020) to run with Rosetta 2 — not natively, but on the x86_64 architecture — until a universal binary for macOS is built that supports the arm64 architecture in new Appple Silicon Macs.

This guide may be used to install other non-universal brew packages.

# Install Homebrew for x86_64 architecture
# https://soffes.blog/homebrew-on-apple-silicon
arch -x86_64 /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

# Install pandoc using that version of Homebrew
arch -x86_64 /usr/local/bin/brew install pandoc

Outputs

==> Downloading https://homebrew.bintray.com/bottles/pandoc-2.11.4.big_sur.bottle.tar.gz
Already downloaded: /Users/nono/Library/Caches/Homebrew/downloads/34e1528919e624583d70b1ef24381db17f730fc69e59144bf48abedc63656678--pandoc-2.11.4.big_sur.bottle.tar.gz
==> Pouring pandoc-2.11.4.big_sur.bottle.tar.gz
🍺  /usr/local/Cellar/pandoc/2.11.4: 10 files, 146.0MB

# Check pandoc's version
arch -x86_64 pandoc --version

Outputs

pandoc 2.11.4
Compiled with pandoc-types 1.22, texmath 0.12.1, skylighting 0.10.2,
citeproc 0.3.0.5, ipynb 0.1.0.1
User data directory: /Users/nono/.local/share/pandoc or /Users/nono/.pandoc
Copyright (C) 2006-2021 John MacFarlane. Web:  https://pandoc.org
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is no
warranty, not even for merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Converting Markdown to Html

arch -x86_64 pandoc sample.md -o sample.html

Contents of sample.md:

# Hello, Apple Silicon!

- Pandoc
- seems
- to
- work.

Contents of sample.html:

<h1 id="hello-apple-silicon">Hello, Apple Silicon!</h1>
<ul>
<li>Pandoc</li>
<li>seems</li>
<li>to</li>
<li>work.</li>
</ul>

While macOS ships with Python 2 by default, you can install set Python 3 as the default Python version on your Mac.

First, you install Python 3 with Homebrew.

brew update && brew install python

To make this new version your default, you can add the following line to your ~/.zshrc file (or ~/.bashrc if you want to expose it in bash instead of zsh).

alias python=/usr/local/bin/python3

Then open a new Terminal and Python 3 should be running.

Let's verify this is true.

python --version # e.g. Python 3.8.5

How do I find the python3 path?

Homebrew provides info about any installed "bottle" via the info command.

brew info python
# python@3.8: stable 3.8.5 (bottled)
# Interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language
# https://www.python.org/
# /usr/local/Cellar/python@3.8/3.8.5 (4,372 files, 67.7MB) *
# ...

And you can find the path we're looking for grep.

brew info python | grep bin
# /usr/local/bin/python3
# /usr/local/opt/python@3.8/libexec/bin

Another way

You can also symlink python3 to python.

ln -sf /usr/local/bin/python3 /usr/local/bin/python

In case your /usr/local/bin/python3 is also symlinked, you can check where it's symlinked to with:

readlink /usr/local/bin/python3

In my case, it returns ../Cellar/python@3.9/3.9.1_6/bin/python3.

How do I use Python 2 if I need it?

Your system's Python 2.7 is still there.

/usr/bin/python --version # e.g Python 2.7.16

You can also use Homebrew's Python 2.

brew install python@2

Before you go

If you found this useful, you might want to join my mailing lists; or take a look at other posts about code, Python, and macOS.