Every sane developer should know about Visual Studio Code, the code editor that aims to be pretty easy to use and great to work with almost any programming language, specially with web technologies. Unfortunately, officially there's no way of making the code editor portable, so copying the content from the installation directory will let a failing executable that only works in your pc due to the installation registry.
Fortunately, although not official, there's a way to have a portable edition of this awesome code editor ! We are talking about Visual Studio Code Portable, a project that is the Visual Studio Code text editor packaged with a PortableApps.com launcher as a portable app, so you can browse in privacy on your iPod, USB flash drive, portable hard drive, etc. It has all the same features as Visual Studio Code, plus, it leaves no personal information behind on the machine you run it on, so you can take it with you wherever you go. For more information about this project, please visit the official repository at Github here.
In this short article, we'll explain you where to get the editor and how to prepare it to work properly everywhere.
Download Visual Studio Code Portable Downloader
Download the VSCodePortable_Latest_v<latest-version>_online.paf.exe file from the releases page at Github here. In our case, till this date the latest available version is the 1.0.1:
The downloader file size is about 1MB, however after the installation, you will need up to 300MB free space in the destination directory. Is important to remeber that this by itself is not an installer, but a downloader, once you select a download directory, the downloader will download the required files from PortableApps.com whose size is about 64MB:
The downloader basically creates a directory in some place of your computer where Visual Studio will be stored, after the setup finishes, you can copy the directory anywhere, like an USB as the content is totally portable and that's it ! You can now carry your favorite code editor everywhere without needing to install it.
