Pysurfer can be a bit tough to install because the dependencies (e.g., Mayavi) can be tricky to get right. Further, the documentation, at the time of this writing, states that Pysurfer only works with Python 2.7. This is not entirely the case, as Pysurfer does in fact work with Python 3. Here, I've documented the installation steps to get Pysurfer working with Python 3 on OSX (I'm guessing these steps also hold for Linux; not sure about Windows).
Before we begin, you'll need conda installed to create a virtual environment, and you will also need Freesurfer installed on your computer (follow the installation steps for your operating system, as is, here).
Then, let's set up our conda
environment. We'll want to specify Python 3.6 and install some dependencies: