Thanks! Useful for my students and my school. I can prepare USB keys and/or put Python on the school's computers without admin rights.

Btw, we should say Portable Python or Python Portable ?

Is Spyder the best IDE ? Is there any other alternative ? Free and open source ?

The community edition of PyCharm is pretty widely regarded. VSCode is also pretty good but I would say it's more of an impressive text editor than an IDE.

update: ah, great minds think alike, I guess: https://github.com/portapps/intellij-idea-community-portable... although there's no obvious reference to PyCharm, I'd bet $1 it would work the same

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While I haven't personally tried it, I bet by setting "IDEA_PROPERTIES=%CD%\portable.properties" and then:

    idea.config.path=./portable-config
    idea.system.path=./portable-system
    idea.plugins.path=./portable-plugins
    idea.log.path=./portable-log

there's a reasonable chance PyCharm (and, as the values imply, IJ) would run portably, too

I use those overrides when trying to isolate my copy of IJ for reporting bugs, but I don't recall if they work _exactly_ the same for PyCharm, and for sure I haven't confirmed that setting them prevents writing into other directories

What about Atom ?

Slow

It's a 64 bits version. Does anyone still use a 32 bits machine ?

Due to incompetent IT staff, I know for a fact that the school I used to go to has 64-bit i5 processors, but the OS installed on them is Windows 10 32-bit, lol

with only 4GB RAM :)

Under Windows, if you have some legacy 16-bit application from the dawn of time, you can run it on Windows 10 32-bit, but not on Windows 10 64-bit.

It's surprising how much industrial equipment is still controlled by 30 year old applications.

Useful!