Home is where .emacs is...

I finally found a way to quickly navigate to my home directory in windows today. Being a long-time (well, 8-10 years) Linux user, when I started working in windows 40 hours a week, I had to adapt a bit, but most of that adaptation meant installing cygwin utilities, bblean, and emacs. Unfortunately, it's most natural to put all the configuration files for these apps in my home directory -- a concept that is almost completely alien to a windows system. As you probably know, in Win XP you do have a home dir, conveniently located at c:Documents and Settingsusername which is not extremely easy to navigate to, and there are no simple shortcuts to get there as there are in Linux / unix environments.

This has been annoying me for some time. Everything goes into that directory -- I've moved firefox downloads, Visual Studio projects, symlinked My Documents to there, etc... Now before you shout out that I brought this upon my self, consider that:

• I needed everything to be in the same location, for what should be obvious reasons. (but if the reason's arent obvious, try backing up all your crap from a multi-year old windows machine where you didn't keep everything in one place)


• More things were already using this location than were not (remember, most of what I use is cygwin).


• Cygwin makes it mildly painful to access things that don't fit nicely into the cygwin virtual filesystem thing.

Today, however, I found a solution. Oddly enough, the integration between IE and Windows is why this works.

1. Open the Windows Explorer


2. Select View-Toolbars-customize


3. Add the "Home" button to the toolbar


4. Click on it. (This changes the Explorer "mode" to web-browser, and allows access to configure that button.)


5. Select Tools-Internet Options


6. Set your IE home page to c:Documents and Settingsusername


7. Voila! Click on the home button again, and there you are :)