Running PSPad from a pen drive

Hi guys, I discovered PSPad a couple of months ago and fell in love, instantly adopting it for all my projects, replacing what I was using, EditPlus2.

I've just started University, doing a degree in Web Page Development, and although they suggest we use FrontPage 2003 for all our work, they're flexible enough to let us use something else, so I'm planning on using PSPad.

My problem is that none of the computers within the uni have PSPad installed, and while I could easily go and install it on each one as I use it, it would be a pain in the ass, plus it would mean I'd need to go into the options each time and set it just as I like it.

To this end, I was wondering if it's possible to install and run PSPad from a USB pen drive?

Without actually testing this yet, I would assume that I can just unpack to a directory on the drive, and run it from there. But would this work? Would all of my settings be saved to the drive, thus allowing me to only configure it once, and have it running how I like on each machine I then use it on, or will it still save the configuration to the computer?

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

PSPad is extremely portable. One out of approximately 1,000 reasons why I love it. Whatever you did to install it: Just go to

Settings -> Program settings -> System integration

and disable "Multi user environment" (I think it's disabled by default, but just in case ...). Then close PSPad and copy the program folder to your thumb drive. That's it.

In a non-multiuser environment, all settings are stored in various ini files in the PSPad folder, most notably PSPad.ini. PSPad can thus run completely self-contained from any kind of storage medium.

But in a multi-user environment where you are allowed to install software (upon request, maybe), it makes sense to install PSPad for good and use the multi-user option. This means it writes the settings to your user profile, that's all.

I am sure that if you talk to your teachers (admins, ... whoever is in charge of the computers) and give them a chance to review the wealth of possibilities PSPad gives, they will make it the university's instrument of choice, at least as a secondary tool. It's just great, and no strings attached. If you don't like it, dont't use it, it won't bother you or anyone else.

Forgot to mention that you can't use some of the more convenient options (like "integrate with right mouse click") if you're not an admin. But otherwise, it will just run and run and ... well ... it might crash occasionally. So, as always, you better save your work from time to time.

I personally have PSPad on my usb stick as I do a lot of my PHP work in work. I also have XAMPPlite on there (Apache, PHP and MySQL) along with Firefox portable. For testing page design. I was thinking about Opera USB as well but it looks a bit dubious.

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Carbonize

Cheers for the info, that is good to know, I'll play around with it tomorrow and see what I can come up with.

I'm quite impressed with the idea of running a web server off a pen drive. I've just started using XAMPP on my development server (before I would install everything, Apache, php, etc.. separately, but XAMPP takes the hassle out of it), but to be able to have one that I can take to clients and the like, that is ace. How do you access it? i.e. what do you type into the address bar in your browser?

It's just localhost. In the xampplite folder are programs such as startxampp and stopxampp. Just remember that Xampp comes with PHP5 whilst your clients may still be on 4.

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Carbonize

Is there a way to avoid PSPad updating the registry? Even with the multi user disabled, it still creates entries in HKCU\Software\PSPad.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/16/2006 13:55 by toblo.

toblo:

Is there a way to avoid PSPad updating the registry? Even with the multi user disabled, it still creates entries in HKCU\Software\PSPad.

No, because PSPad need it for other instances.
This is last path to PSPad folder only.

You could make a batch file that deletes all the keys PSPad creates. (Though I have no clue what those are.)

I will prepare PSPad version with Set portable button.
This will set all depending options to make PSPad portable and will clear all after itself.
But it will be not available in next release