What you want is possible to achieve with TeX Live to some extent, but there are some caveats. People often want multi-OS setup on a network share and this is well supported. On a USB stick things are more complicated, because of symlinks which are not supported on Windows file systems[*] (FAT32 is the one usually found on USB sticks).
One way around it is to install with --portable option, add any platforms you require afterwards (Windows, OS X, etc.; this can be done only when installed on a Unix-like OS, again, due to symlinks problem), and finally copy everything to a USB stick with dereferencing symlinks to copy the linked files instead.
You won't be able to update such an installation afterwards, though (or to be more specific, updates of binary packages with symlinks won't work[*]). However, binaries are usually not updated between yearly releases, so you might in fact get away with this, but there is no guarantee [**].
A possible further hack would be to remove all platforms but the Windows one, but only from the TL database and not their actual files, so tlmgr is effectively fooled and won't do any updates to the "problematic" packages. Such a setup may be fragile under certain circumstances [**] and requires hand-editing of TL database, which I don't recommend to anyone unless they know exactly what they are doing and can recover from possible breakage.
Yet another approach to updateable system on a stick could be to keep updating the original "source" installation and sync it with the USB one afterwards, which is a bit less convenient and also means no updates on the go, but OTOH shouldn't cause any problems (the last famous words).
[*] Edit: To clarify the issue with symlinks - TL packages are stored simply as compressed tar archives (+ some meta data about the package). Symlinks are archived together with regular files and everything is extracted during package installation and/or update. If the file system doesn't support symlinks, this extraction will fail and therefore package installation/update will fail.
[**] Edit 2: TL makes package backup before its update, so update failure should not be fatal (the old version will be restored), but this can be fragile if the old version has some incompatibility with dependent packages.
(Turning a comment which seemed to help into an answer here)
BasicTeX is a TeXLive installation, the linked document just explains how it was put together. So you don't need to run TeXLive installer after installing BasicTeX.
So my suggestion is to start from a clean slate, and just (re)installing BasicTeX.
As it is TeXLive, you can manage it with tlmgr.
Best Answer
Try downloading install-tl-unx.tar.gz . Create a folder called
texlive2013inside your home directory and installTeX Livethere. You could also install it on a portable hard drive or a large capacity memory stick, but in the latter case compiling may be painfully slow.This worked on a linux machine on which I do not have admin privileges (it was necessary because it had a prehistoric TeX installation). I think it will work on a Mac as well. You will probably need to manually edit your login script so that the path environment variable makes
latex,pdflatexetc. available from the terminal.For an editor, try running
emacsfrom the terminal; it may be installed already. If it doesn't work, you could tryemacs -nw(which runsemacsin the terminal window itself). Failing that, there is alwaysvi, or just edit yourLaTeXfiles usingTextEdit, or another text editor that is already installed.EDIT
On second thoughts, you can probably install an editor of your choice in your home directory or on a portable storage device. Most OS X applications don't care where they are installed.