*update*: ah, great minds think alike, I guess: https://github.com/portapps/inte...

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