How to enable portable mode in Paint.NET
In recent days, there has been a great deal of interest in the supposed loss of Paint, followed by the bizarre, inexplicable delight people felt when it transpired the app will live on in the Windows Store. The (subjectively) brilliant Paint.NET was originally built as a successor to Paint, and the developer recently said that it too will be coming to the Windows Store.
He also made reference to a portable mode that would be coming to Paint.NET, and this caused ripples of excitement through the app's userbase. Well, Paint.NET 4.0.17 is out, and portability is an option -- you just need to do a little work. So, here's how to enable portable mode in Paint.NET.
First of all, you will need to make sure that you have Paint.NET 4.0.17 installed -- older versions do not support portable mode. Before you continue, there are a few things to keep in mind. Firstly, the updater is not currently working in the portable version of Paint.NET 4.0.17. Secondly the repair function that checks for missing files doesn't work. You'll need to use the portable version on a system that already has .NET Framework 4.6 installed.
- Navigate to the Paint.NET installation folder in Explorer -- by default, this is C:\Program Files\paint.net.
- Open the file PaintDotNet.exe.config in Notepad or the text editor of your choosing.
- Above the penultimate line that reads </appSettings>, insert a new line and enter <add key="PaintDotNet.EnablePortableMode" value="true" />.
- Save and close the file.
All you need to do now is to copy the entire Paint.NET installation folder onto a USB drive and fire up PaintDotNet.exe to run the program.
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