List of portable software

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A USB flash drive

Portable software is a class of software that is suitable for use on portable drives such as a USB (thumb) drive or iPod or Palm PDA with "drive mode", although any external hard drive could theoretically be used. [1] [2] The concept of carrying one's favored applications, utilities, and files on a portable drive for use on any computer is one which has evolved considerably in recent years.

Programs in this category (also known as portable applications) are typically 'lite' versions of their parent software, but there are many exceptions.

To be considered portable, for purpose of this list, a software program must:

  1. Not require any kind of formal installation onto a computer's permanent storage device to be executed, and can be stored on a removable storage device such as USB flash drive, enabling it to be used on multiple computers.
  2. Settings are stored with, and can be carried around with, the software (i.e., they are written to the USB drive). If the registry is used to store settings, the application's configuration isn't portable, and must be set up on every PC it is used on
  3. Leaves a zero (or near-zero) "footprint" on any PC it's run on after being used. i.e., All temporary files/registry settings should be removed once the program has exited, and files created by the user can be saved directly to the same removable media as the application is stored on.

Generally, smaller utility/toolkit software is inherently fairly portable; though larger applications are sometimes changed in order to allow a portable versions to be released (e.g., Opera@USB).

Contents

[edit] Application launchers


See also: Comparison of portable platforms

[edit] Development

[edit] IDEs

[edit] Scripting Languages

[edit] Visual mapping tool/Productivity tool

[edit] Graphics

[edit] 3D Modeling And Rendering

[edit] Graphic Editors

[edit] Processing

[edit] Viewers

[edit] Document Based

[edit] Office and Publishing

[edit] Editors

  • EmEditor Professional - for portability, select Import and Export on Tools menu.
  • gVim - for advanced users
  • Notepad++
  • Notepad2
  • NoteTab Light
  • Q10 - fullscreen, for writers.
  • PSPad - for portable use choose CAB archive
  • SciTE - for portability, set SciTE_HOME environment variable before launching
  • TED Notepad - for portability, create a tednpad.ini file
  • Editplus - for syntax highlighting, file type conversions, search-and-replace using regular expressions, searching in files, keystroke recording, spell check, auto-completion, code folding, etc.
  • Textpad for text documents of every sort.
  • UltraEdit (UE3)
  • VEDIT - for portability, check "Install onto removable USB drive" checkbox on the first setup dialog.

[edit] Personal Notes

  • NotesHolder - desktop notes, for portability install it in Portable mode.
  • Personal Knowbase - note organizer. For portability, select the removeable drive letter as "Destination" during installation.

[edit] Educational

[edit] Games

See List of portable computer games

[edit] Internet

[edit] Web browsers

[edit] Email clients

[edit] Instant messaging

[edit] FTP clients

[edit] Download managers

[edit] P2P file sharing

[edit] IRC

  • ChatZilla Note: Requires a Mozilla based browser, e.g. SeaMonkey, or Firefox.
  • HydraIRC
  • Miranda IM
  • mIRC Note: There is a U3 version of mIRC that can be installed on U3 drives. The original application is portable, leaving behind only the license key in the registry. (This may not be true with the newer versions that are vista-compatible, as their default user data area was changed to the user's application data folder.) Since v3.1, it can be started from a command line using the -portable switch to use settings, DLLs, and license keys that are stored in the same folder as mirc.exe.
  • Nettalk
  • Pidgin (formerly Gaim)
  • Opera@USB (Integrated Irc client)
  • XChat
  • Portable X-Chat Aqua - for Mac OS X
  • KVIrc

[edit] RSS, Atom readers

[edit] Telnet, SSH clients

[edit] Bookmark managers

[edit] Search engines

[edit] Podcast managers

[edit] Proxy server/clients and Routing Networks

[edit] Wikis

[edit] Wiki-like (Note: These are not web-based)

[edit] Miscellaneous

  • Moka5 LivePC Engine (Portable VMware). Note: Dynamically loads and unloads network drivers and requires administrator rights.
  • Mojopac portable chopped down copy of windows. Requires administrator rights.
  • Portable Ubuntu for Windows - Portable version of Ubuntu that runs "on top of Windows" (using CoLinux)

[edit] Multimedia

[edit] File converters

  • Audiograbber is a CD audio extractor (digitally).
  • BonkEnc
  • CDex
  • MediaCoder
  • SUPER - (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer) is a program that easily encapsulates the capabilities of ffmpeg, MEncoder, mplayer, x264, mppenc, ffmpeg2theora, and the theora/vorbis RealProducer plugIn. Has problems with portability.
  • TMPGEnc - a video encoder that supports HDV import/output along with DivX 6 AVI, MPEG-1/2/4, QuickTime (MOV), and Window Media (WMV/WMV-HD/WMA) input/output.
  • E.M. Total Video Converter

[edit] CD/DVD burning

[edit] Editors

[edit] Audio/Midi Sequencer

  • Reaper has a .bat file for a USB stick installation

[edit] Players

[edit] Recorders

[edit] Video Capture

[edit] Networking

[edit] HTTP servers

[edit] See also

[edit] Web applications run using the HTTP server

Once a portable web server such as XAMPP or WOS is running, portable applications requiring the Apache and MySQL can then be run. Some examples of which are:

[edit] Miscellaneous

[edit] Other Tools

[edit] Web Editors

  • Portable Nvu and KompoZer - for Mac OS X and Windows.
  • OpenOffice.org Portable - Complete office suite, which includes HTML editor.

[edit] Calendar management

[edit] File management

[edit] File Archivers and Extractors

  • 7-Zip
  • Filzip
  • PeaZip, for Linux and Windows
  • iZarc2go, Portable version of iZarc
  • WinRAR, Portable version for Windows, still requires having a license for a regular version of WinRAR. The version number for WinRAR Unplugged is 3.7.1.1, while the latest WinRAR for Windows version is 3.80.

[edit] Unit Converters

  • Converber is a unit converter that supports over 1000 various units of measure in 32 categories. Customizable.

[edit] PDF Tools

[edit] Readers

[edit] Writers

[edit] Security and Encryption

[edit] Password Management

[edit] Anti-Spyware/Malware

[edit] AntiVirus

[edit] Real-Time Disk/Volume Encryption

Note: All of the software in this section requires administrator privileges to start their respective drivers.

[edit] File Encryption

[edit] System Maintenance

[edit] Storage Management

Visual maps of free space and biggest files and folders on hard drive.

[edit] System Information

  • CPU-Z - CPU and memory hardware details - clock and FSB speeds, SPD, OS version.
  • AIDA32 - freeware system information, diagnostics, and auditing program written by Tamas Miklos, Win 95-XP.
  • SIW - SIW is an advanced System Information for Windows tool that gathers detailed information about your system properties and settings and displays it in an extremely comprehensible manner.

[edit] Partition/File Recovery

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ John Guilfoil (2006-09-07). "Fun with Portable Software". http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/09/07/133422.php. Retrieved on 2008-01-24. 
  2. ^ makeuseof.com. "100 Portable Apps for your USB Stick". http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/portable-software-usb/. Retrieved on 2008-01-24. 
  3. ^ SourceForge - Polipo - A caching HTTP proxy (web cache)

[edit] External Links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_portable_software"
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