It might be useful for me to explain just what I'm doing, and why it's convenient for me to have ~ expand to USERPROFILE.
I keep my home directory in Subversion (http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/06/svn_homedir.html explains the idea). I thus have copies of all my dot files -- .bashrc, .ssh, .emacs.d, etc -- on many different machines. For better or for worse, on the Windows machines that I use, all that stuff is in %USERPROFILE%, so as far as I'm concerned, %USERPROFILE% on Windows is analogous to ~ on *nix -- precisely _because_ all my dotfiles live there. This worked fine, until I encountered the problem I originally posted about: I couldn't access ~/Application Data on Windows. A reasonable workaround is for me to ensure that HOME is set to %USERPROFILE% _before_ I start Emacs -- when I do that, everything works splendidly. (I suspect some people consider this to not be a workaround at all, but rather to be simply the right thing to do; that's fine with me.) But: for reasons I cannot articulate -- perhaps entirely silly reasons, I'll admit -- it bothers me to have to set HOME before I start Emacs. So in my ideal world, Emacs would expand ~ to %USERPROFILE% without my having to do anything at all. I realize this might be a bad thing for Emacs to do in all cases (namely, machines for which %USERPROFILE% doesn't exist, or isn't writable). Given that, perhaps we should add a sentence or two to the section about HOME in either (info "(emacs)General Variables") or (info "(emacs)Windows HOME"), or both: If you would prefer that HOME refer to some other directory, don't change HOME from within Emacs (by, e.g., calling 'setenv'); instead, set the variable's value _before_ you start Emacs, and Emacs will honor that value. -- If you can't change your underwear, can you be sure you have any? _______________________________________________ emacs-pretest-bug mailing list emacs-pretest-bug@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-pretest-bug