Installing Psychopy to run with an external editor

Development
4

Thanks Jon, we’ve tried it on 2 different Macbooks here now and get the below error message when trying to simply invoke /Applications/PsychoPy.app/Contents/MacOS/python from Terminal.app: alex@aholcombes-mbp ~ % /Applications/PsychoPy.app/Contents/MacOS/python yields:

Could not find platform independent libraries <prefix>
Could not find platform dependent libraries <exec_prefix>
Consider setting $PYTHONHOME to <prefix>[:<exec_prefix>]
Python path configuration:
  PYTHONHOME = (not set)
  PYTHONPATH = (not set)
  program name = '/Applications/PsychoPy.app/Contents/MacOS/python'
  isolated = 0
  environment = 1
  user site = 1
  import site = 1
  sys._base_executable = '/Applications/PsychoPy.app/Contents/MacOS/python'
  sys.base_prefix = '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8'
  sys.base_exec_prefix = '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8'
  sys.executable = '/Applications/PsychoPy.app/Contents/MacOS/python'
  sys.prefix = '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8'
  sys.exec_prefix = '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8'
  sys.path = [
    '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python38.zip',
    '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python3.8',
    '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/lib-dynload',
  ]
Fatal Python error: init_fs_encoding: failed to get the Python codec of the filesystem encoding
Python runtime state: core initialized
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'encodings'

Current thread 0x0000000200e1b280 (most recent call first):
<no Python frame>

From all the references to prefix, it looks even these error messages should have an error message in them, because presumably prefix is meant to be something substantive? Get basically the same error when I point VSCode at this as the interpreter. About the possibility of the operating system somehow trying to stop me to use the contents of an App, I copied all the contents into a normal directory structure, and tried to run python there, but get exactly the same error message. I don’t know, it’s possible you sharing whether your PYTHONHOME and PYTHONPATH environment variables could help me.