Software installation

Note

  • First, you should determine your computer’s Operating System (Windows, MacOSX, Ubuntu Linux, …) and its version, as well as the processor type (intel/amd or arm). This information can be found in the “about” or “properties” tab of the system parameters section.

  • You should be connected to the Internet and have about 3~4 GB of free space on your disk to install all the software.

Visual Studio Code

Download and install the code editor Visual Studio Code from https://code.visualstudio.com/download (unless you already have a code editor that you are happy with, e.g. sublime text, notepad++, spyder, pycharm, …)

You can accept all default options proposed during the installation.

R and Rstudio

R is a programming language specialized for statistical data analyses; Download and install it from https://cran.rstudio.com/ (accepting all the default options proposed by the installer)

Rstudio is an Integrated Developpement Environment for R which greatly simplifies the use of RMarkdown. You can download and install the free version of RStudio Desktop from https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/ (accepting all the default options)

Praat speech editor

Download the speech editor Praat from https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/.

If you are a Windows user, you must extract the program (praat.exe) from the zip file. When you click on its icon to launch Praat, Windows Defender may warn you that it is threat. Do not worry and run it anayway.

Git

Install the version control software Git, following the instructions at https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-Installing-Git

Under Windows, you will download the Git for Windows installer from https://git-scm.com/download/win

Note

Windows only. IMPORTANT: During the installation:

  • In “Choosing the default Editor used by Git”, select Use Notepad

  • In “Adjusting your PATH environment”, select Use Git and optional Unix tools...

  • In “Configuring the Terminal emulator”, select Use MinTTY

    You can keep the defaults for all other options.

git local configuration

After the installation, start Git bash if you are under Windows or open a terminal if you are under MacOSX or Linux (MacOS: type terminal in the Spotlight search field; Linux: press Ctrl-Alt-T ), and type the following lines, after replacing firstname, lastname and your_email by your personal information:

git config --global user.name "firstname lastnames" 
git config --global user.email "your_email" 
git config --global core.editor nano

You can now close the terminal by typing the command exit or, faster, by pressing Ctrl-D, or by just closing its window.

Python

  1. Unless Python3, version >= 3.8, is already installed on your computer, download and install it from http://www.python.org.

Important. Make sure to select ‘Add python.exe to PATH’ when running the installer under Windows.

  1. Check that you can start Python from a command line.

    • Windows:

      Start Git Bash. This should open a terminal with a blinking cursor, type the following command line:

      echo "alias python='winpty python.exe'" >> ~/.bash_profile

      and press Enter to execute the command.

      Close Git Bash, and reopen it again (this runs the .bash_profile script).

      Type python on the command line, then press enter.

      If you computer displays

      python: command not found

      then you must add the location (folder) of python.exe to the PATH environment variable. Instructions to do this are provided at https://realpython.com/add-python-to-path/

      Otherwise, you should see a display like:

      Python 3.12.0 (main, Dec  7 2023, 17:39:28) [GCC 11.4.0] on linux
  Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

      Type quit() and press Enter to exit python interpreter.

    • Mac or Linux:

      Open a terminal (MacOS: type terminal in the Spotlight search field; Linux: pressing Ctrl-Alt-T ), and type python then press ‘Enter’.

      This should display something like:

      Python 3.12.0 (main, Dec  7 2023, 17:39:28) [GCC 11.4.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

    Type quit() and press Enter to exit python interpreter.

Basic python libraries

Open a terminal (Git bash in Windows), and type:

pip install ipython jupyter numpy matplotlib pandas seaborn

Pygame

Pygame is a python module to program simple video games In a Terminal, type:

pip install pygame

Expyriment

Expyriment is a Python module to program psychology experiments.

To install it, follow the instructions at https://docs.expyriment.org/Installation.html. In a nutshell:

pipx install expyriment

Then, run:

expyriment -D

And type master when given a choice to select a branch.

Note

(advanced users) if you do not want to use pipx, you can create your own a virtual environment for expyriment (with conda, pyenv, uv…)