Intellij 9.0.2 on Windows 7 putting the .IntelliJIdea90 folder under the Administrator folder

Question

For some reason the .IntelliJIdea90 folder is under C:\Users\Administrator.IntelliJIdea90 when I installed Idea 9.0.2 on Windows 7 (64 bit). Does anybody have an idea why this would happen?

Answer 1

IDEA is using user.home Java property to find the location of your home folder. On your system this property returns Administrator for some reason. It's JDK standard property, so the problem is outside of IDEA code. Not sure what can be causing it, maybe some environment issue. On my Windows 7 64-bit IDEA puts this folder into the correct location with my user name.

You can get better luck with this OS/JDK related issue at http://superuser.com.

Paths to IDEA folders can be changed in IDEA_HOME\bin\idea.properties.

Answer 2

I would always suggest to use for IntelliJ the ZIP versions - so never the installer. This way you have the greatest control over your configuration, and also can have more IntelliJ versions side by side on the same computer.

After downloading the IDEA ZIP, you need to edit just two files: idea.bat - to specify the JDK at the beginning idea.properties - to change where the configuration is saved

I would suggest to use $idea.home as a place for configuration instead of the default $user.home . This way each IntelliJ version would have it's own configuration that would not mix with the other installations. The big advantage of this approach is that is also portable among computers, e.g. once you do the above, you can copy that to several other computers and IntelliJ will just work there too.

The only downside of the method is that without the installer, you need to create on the desktop the icon to idea.bat manually.