PsychoPy App (aka "PsychoPy Standalone")

This is the wxPython application to support creating experiments in the PsychoPy library.

History

• from its inception around 2004 until 2026 the code was included within the psychopy repository. The app and the lib were essentially synonymous.
• PsychoPy Studio : in 2025 the app was rewritten for Electron/web using the Svelte framework in JavaScript, which was first released in 2026. See the PsychoPy downloads to fetch that.
• in 2026 this code was moved to its own repository psychopy-app, allowing greater independence from the lib and meaning that pip install psychopy no longer depends on wxPython`
• this wxPython application, now dubbed PsychoPy App, will continued to be supported for a short period (until 2027?) but the expectation is that it will be fully replaced by PsychoPy Studio.

Motivations

The motivations of creating this app were about making it easier to get up and running with PsychoPy experiments. It reduced those barriers by:

• (around 2004-2005) packaging a Python interpreter and all the required dependencies into an app bundle that could be easily installed
• (around 2009) adding a graphical "Builder" interface to allow non programmers to get up and running as well (although this is now recommended interface for programmers as well)

The motivations for moving to JS/Electron/Svelte (i.e. PsychoPy Studio), discussed in greater dept in this blog about PsychoPy Studio but briefly:

• wxPython is big and can be hard to install (notably on Linux)
• unparalleled cross-platform support (wxPython was OK, but not this good)
• web UI frameworks just are the way of the future (note how many apps are now built on JS with Electron). That means those web UI frameworks are the best supported UI frameworks. Again wxPython was OK, but not this good!
• better independence of the app UI from the experiment library

The code for PsychoPy Studio was recreated with an almost complete parity of features in roughly 10 months by the team at Open Science Tools Ltd..

Contributions

To contribute, please fork the repository, hack in a feature branch, and send a pull request. For more, see CONTRIBUTING.md and the developers documentation at https://www.psychopy.org/developers

More information

• Homepage: https://www.psychopy.org
• Forum: https://discourse.psychopy.org