On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 2:17 AM, Alan Gauld <alan.ga...@btinternet.com> wrote: > On 27/03/14 21:01, Chris “Kwpolska” Warrick wrote: >> Painful? How painful can `cd Desktop` be? Certainly less than `D:` >> followed by `cd PythonProjects`… > > > Because the desktop is hardly ever anywhere near where the cmd prompt lands > you.
I just tested on my Windows 7 box. It got me to C:\Users\Kwpolska. `cd Desktop` is enough. I also tested on a third-party’s XP box. C:\Documents and Settings\[username]. `cd Desktop`, too (though it’s locale-dependent). Does not look far from the desktop, does it? Well, the only places where this might not work are Administrator prompts in Vista-and-newer (which there is NO REAL REASON to use for Python) — or possibly some ultra-crazy corporate environments (but you should not be learning Python there — and if you are working there, you know how to work with the command line/Windows/source control already). Or, of course, systems where you changed something and it is not your profile directory — but it’s your doing. So, it’s pretty much the home directory everywhere you should be concerned with. > you have to remember where it is. There is no ~ shortcut in Windows. > On my system that means typing something like: > > C:\Documents and Settings\alang\Desktop or just cd %USERPROFILE%. Different drives would make you jump to %HOMEDRIVE% and then to %HOMEPATH%. >> >> >> Can't you make a symlink pointing to Desktop? (in C:\ or anywhere else) > > > You could, and that would help a little. But the problem on Windows is that > what appears on the Desktop *display* is an amalgam of (up to 3?) different > folders in the file system. So just because you see an icon on the 'desktop' > doesn't mean you actually know which folder it is in. But, for user-created files, it always goes to %USERPROFILE%/Desktop. > Secondly this correlation between desktop folder and desktop display means > that's a bad place to store python files since every file you create will > add to the clutter of icons on your display. In my python projects file I > have over 100 small test files. That would be a > lot of icons messing up my screen. Create a folder on the desktop, or even in the home directory. A much nicer place than the drive root — and a much modern way to store it (drive root sounds DOS-y) -- Chris “Kwpolska” Warrick <http://kwpolska.tk> PGP: 5EAAEA16 stop html mail | always bottom-post | only UTF-8 makes sense _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor