Ben Chuanlong Du's Blog

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Make Your Life Easier with Portable Applications

Using portable applications is a good way to make your digital life easier. They do not eat up your disk quickly nor do they mess up the registry of your Windows OS. You can always copy these applications from one computer to another and use it out of box. Or you can install portable applications on a flash drive and use it on any computer with a Windows OS. PortableApps offers all kinds of portable apps. What is better is that it also offers a plotform which integrate many functionalities together such as installing portable apps (directly from the repository), updating portable apps, searching for installed apps, etc. There is also a Chinese website whcih offers portable apps with Chinese characteristics that are compatible with the PortableApps platform.

There are some software that I use often but is not support offically by PortableApps yet. For example, Cygwin and Python. There is a good portable version of Cygwin named CygwinPortable on GitHub. It uses ConEmu for the console which supports multi-tabs and can also be used as Windows command prompt. CygwinPortable also allows you to create users and define the default user, which is very convenient. Another advantage of CygwinPortable (over MobaXterm and other portable version of Cygwin) is that it has built-in Python suppport, which makes Vim and other software installed on it Python-supported. Though CygwinPortable has built-in Python support, the Python coming with it has limitations due to library dependencies. For example, some Python packages such as FuzzyWuzzy and NLTK fails to work in CygwinPortable. Anaconda Python is great portable distribution of Python. It comes with many popular Python packages such as NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, PIL, PyQt, etc. and also code editors such as PyCharm, PyScripter and IDLE.

Tips on PortableApps

  1. The PortableApps launcher might causes desktop icon not to show up. Closing the PortableApps launcher solves the problem.

  2. You can actually run PortableApps programs directly (without using the PortableApps launcher). If you'd like to do so, you can make shortcuts of PortableApps programs on the desktop and/or in the start menu to make things easier.

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