[AmerDwight]

What and why

A portable Windows build, lolPing-<version>-portable.exe, next to the installer: run it from any folder or a USB drive, with settings, emotes and caches in a data folder beside the .exe and nothing in %APPDATA% or the registry. An unpacked copy (win-unpacked) is portable too when a portable.txt sits next to lolPing.exe.

How it works (src/main/portable.ts, paths.ts, index.ts):

• electron-builder's portable target sets PORTABLE_EXECUTABLE_DIR; that, or the marker file, decides the data folder once at startup. A development build is never portable.
• userData and sessionData are moved there before the single-instance lock, so the MCP pipe and token follow, an installed and a portable copy run side by side, and two copies of one portable folder don't.
• No updater in a portable build (electron-updater would install the downloaded setup over it) and no launch-at-startup (the path moves with the folder, nothing uninstalls the Run entry). The settings page hides that switch via a new AppStatus.portable, and About lists it under known limitations.

One thing for you to decide: .github/workflows/release.yml gains one line to upload the portable .exe. AGENTS.md says that file is yours, so drop it if you'd rather not ship the portable build from releases; the target still builds locally with npm run dist. The portable .exe is not in latest.yml, so installed copies are unaffected.

No new network host.

How I tested it

• npm run typecheck and npm test (tests/main/portable.test.ts covers the launcher variable, the marker file, the installed case and the development exclusion).
• Built on a GitHub windows-latest runner: npm run test:helper and npm run dist produce both lolPing-Setup-0.6.0.exe and lolPing-0.6.0-portable.exe.
• Not yet run by hand on a real Windows desktop (will tick below once done).

Ran by hand on:

• Windows 11
• macOS (Apple Silicon) — not affected: IS_PORTABLE is false there unless a portable.txt is placed next to the binary

Checklist

• npm run typecheck, npm run test:helper and npm test pass
• New logic has tests; a bug fix has a test that fails without it, or I explained why it can't
• User-facing text is in both English and Chinese (src/shared/i18n.ts, both READMEs)
• docs/design.md is updated if the behaviour it describes changed
• Screenshot attached if something visible changed
• If I used an AI tool, it had AGENTS.md in context and I read the whole diff. Tool: Claude Code

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_0135UvqhMz4dTkZUm42VbK44