I will be working from a laptop I am borrowing while my laptop is away for repair. The problem is that I cannot install any software on the borrowed laptop. Is it possible for me to use one of my Scrivener files from an external hard drive even if Scrivener is not installed on the hard drive? My guess is that is not possible, but I just need to check in case it is because not being able to work in Scrivener for a week or longer is going to be tough.
Run it this way:
It might work if you create a top level folder called “Applications” on your external drive, and put Scrivener into it, then the Mac will consider it an official installation for the purposes of associating .scriv projects so you can double-click on them in Finder, Quick Look preview, and other such things.
But I haven’t actually tested that with a stand-alone external drive. It’s just something I’ve noticed happening when I have multiple partitions on a single drive, with different versions of macOS on each partition. In that case each installations Applications folder gets registered on boot, and was resulting in annoying things like some programs complaining about being installed multiple times. I got to where I had to figure out how to stop the Mac from automatically mounting these other drives.
If that doesn’t work, you can also create a folder called “Applications” in your user folder on the Mac and install stuff there. That is definitely an official way of user-level installation.
At any rate, you do obviously need Scrivener somewhere to open Scrivener projects. Without Scrivener they are just folders with a bunch of RTF, TXT and XML files in them.
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Thanks, Amber.
I am using Scrivener now from the external drive on the borrowed computer. It does run on trial mode. Are there folders I need to drag and drop into the external drive so that Scrivener knows I have purchased it? For another app, it was recommended to me that I drag and drop additional folders that are typically located in ~Library/ Application Support. In any case, the trial mode is not an issue since I hope I will have my computer back within a week and the trial is 30 days.
However, I wish I could have my Scrivener preferences the way I had set them up on my computer. Is there way to have them on the borrowed laptop? May be dragging some of the files from ~Library can help?
Scrivener opened my main Scrivener file but did crashed once. Hopefully this won’t repeat. Fingers crossed.
I used to be able to install applications into a custom folder under /Users/rdale, such as “My Apps”, and run them from there. If you have your own account on this borrowed Mac, you could possibly do that.
As for your settings, Lit & Lat have an article about using Scrivener on multiple computers that includes copying your settings from one computer to another here: Installing on Additional Computers / macOS / Knowledge Base - Literature and Latte Support
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hmm that’s interesting. So I am not allowed to download anything on the borrowed laptop. Is installing applications in a custom folder different from downloading them?
Yes. Downloading an application requires access to the internet and to local storage. Installing it requires access to the destination folder. From a security perspective, these are two different tasks.
In order to use the internet effectively, you need to have some amount of local disk access, if only to process web pages before displaying them. Many public computers – like in libraries – allow temporary storage for this kind of use, to save files for printing, etc. but prohibit the kind of permanent storage you would need to install an application.
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Maybe a little more background would help understand your limitations. For instance:
Is this because you are unable to add new applications to the Applications folder? Can you copy files from your external drive to the Desktop or Documents folder in the finder?
Is this a loaner from a repair shop that is locked down so you are unable to write files anywhere on the hard drive, or are you borrowing a friend’s laptop, and they asked you not to download files/add applications to it?
I just created an account on my Mac without administrator access. I then downloaded Scrivener to the Desktop, (fyi, I also renamed the app “Scriv3” to make sure I wasn’t running the version in /Applications–that’s not necessary for you to do).
I was able to launch that copy of Scrivener as this other user without issue. If you were given a loaner from a shop that doesn’t have someone else’s personal files all over it, then you could probably do the same.