Portable TextPad needs relative paths to tools.

spintronic34 · Post by **spintronic34** » Fri Sep 11, 2020 11:19 pm

Hi all,
I'm using a portable instance of Textpad 8.4.1 64-bit on my flash drive. I also have a very portable instance of Strawberry Perl on this flash drive. I have tools in TextPad that run my Perl scripts and capture output. The problem is that the drive changes on my flash drive and I have to update the path to Perl. Is there a variable within TextPad that would allow me to update this in my configuration automatically? How would I turn

F:\path-to-perl\perl.exe

into

H:\path-to-perl\perl.exe

the next time I plug in TextPad to a new machine?

Thanks in advance!

ben_josephs · Post by **ben_josephs** » Mon Sep 14, 2020 8:49 am

As an alternative, you might assign a permanent drive letter to the drive:
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-assi ... windows-10.

spintronic34 · Post by **spintronic34** » Mon Sep 14, 2020 6:25 pm

ben_josephs wrote:As an alternative, you might assign a permanent drive letter to the drive:
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-assi ... windows-10.

Thanks, I'll try doing that for all of my machines.

Post by **AmigoJack** » Mon Sep 14, 2020 6:27 pm

ben_josephs wrote:assign a permanent drive letter

The main purpose of "portable" means to use it on any system, not always the same. That's what makes relative paths powerful.

Using any USB storage device means also using it for unknown systems, and there maybe only once. And in such a case to use i.e. TextPad right away without any need to install it.

(Strictly speaking TextPad can be used without installation, but it would always insist on being started for the first time. I understand that the shell extension for the Explorer's context menu must be installed, but everything else is just for the user's comfort of having shortcut icons to click on and appearing in Windows' control panel to "uninstall" it.)

spintronic34 · Post by **spintronic34** » Tue Sep 15, 2020 5:27 pm

So is there a way to detect the drive letter that TextPad is working from so I can run a USB Drive copy of Perl on a new computer?

AmigoJack wrote:
ben_josephs wrote:assign a permanent drive letter
The main purpose of "portable" means to use it on any system, not always the same. That's what makes relative paths powerful.

Using any USB storage device means also using it for unknown systems, and there maybe only once. And in such a case to use i.e. TextPad right away without any need to install it.

(Strictly speaking TextPad can be used without installation, but it would always insist on being started for the first time. I understand that the shell extension for the Explorer's context menu must be installed, but everything else is just for the user's comfort of having shortcut icons to click on and appearing in Windows' control panel to "uninstall" it.)