Location of user-level git dotfiles on Windows

[jennybc]

From AppVeyor and my Windows VM, I gather that user's .gitconfig and .gitignore are typically not in what R regards as user's home directory. On my VM:

as.list(Sys.getenv(
  c("HOME", "R_USER", "HOMEDRIVE", "HOMEPATH", "USERPROFILE")
))
#> $HOME
#> [1] "C:/Users/JennyVM/Documents"
#> 
#> $R_USER
#> [1] "C:/Users/JennyVM/Documents"
#> 
#> $HOMEDRIVE
#> [1] "C:"
#> 
#> $HOMEPATH
#> [1] "\\Users\\JennyVM"
#> 
#> $USERPROFILE
#> [1] "C:\\Users\\JennyVM"

normalizePath("~")
#> [1] "C:\\Users\\JennyVM\\Documents"

list.files(Sys.getenv("USERPROFILE"), all.files = TRUE, pattern = "git", full.names = TRUE)
#> [1] "C:\\Users\\JennyVM/.gitconfig"

Home directory is C:/Users/USER/Documents but user's git dot files are one level up, in C:/Users/USER. I see the same on AppVeyor. I have accepted default git setup everywhere.

edit_git_config("user") and edit_git_ignore("user") should be adjusted accordingly, for Windows. Currently they seek/put these files in the home directory. This new config file then seems to mask the pre-existing one, causing, e.g., user.name and user.email to be appear to be unset.

[jennybc]

SO thread that confirms what I see:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2114111/where-does-git-config-global-get-written-to

More detailed document that indicates this is total mess, i.e. there are at least 3 possible locations:

https://www.onwebsecurity.com/configuration/git-on-windows-location-of-global-configuration-file.html

This is the tricky one. When using the Windows command shell, batch scripts or Windows programs, the file will be read from %USERPROFILE%\.gitconfig

However, when you're using msys (bash) this will be read from $HOME/.gitconfig

Yet another different location can be found from within Emacs (for instance by using magit) when Emacs is started from a Windows command shell. Emacs sets the HOME variable as %APPDATA% , which means that .gitconfig will reside in %APPDATA%\.gitconfig

Handy way to check location of global gitignore, if you have access to command line git:

jenny@2015-mbp usethis $ git config --get core.excludesfile
/Users/jenny/.gitignore_global