On my Windows 7, 10 & 11 laptops my first installed program is always Portable Apps (portableapps.com).
With that I can run Firefox and other browsers, Photofiltre, Thunderbird, Filezilla, Putty, Arduino ide and hundreds of other apps without them or their libraries being installed or polluting the registry.
Generally it's a single tick box per app and it's installed to a local folder or USB stick.
Sorry, but the instructions to install Node-red on Windows, derived from this and other threads AND the official documentation (paraphrased for simplicity):
"To install Node-red you should open a command window, or is it a powershell window? Download and install the latest version of node.js, but not if it's an odd number. Install npm or is it Visual Studio?, install Chocolatey or Sticky Toffee Pudding, then you might want to change the npm cache folder. If you want to use some nodes you will have to install windows-build-tools."
"To run Node-red open a command prompt, not a powershell window and type node-red. Or install and use pm2, but we won't tell you how or what it is, or create a task schedule, ditto"
If it wasn't a tragedy it would be laughable.
Is Node-red on Windows really harder to install than let's say Photoshop? an Office suite?
Is it too fantastical to imagine a USB stick with portable apps and Node-red that can be plugged into any PC and it runs?
