Windows: let settings beside the program win over %APPDATA% - #40
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> Drafted by Claude (Opus 5), an LLM by Anthropic, at andy5995's > direction. Putting the settings under %APPDATA% would have quietly orphaned the configuration of anyone upgrading from an older Windows build. MultiMail shipped those as a plain archive -- upstream tested 32- and 64-bit console builds through Windows 10 -- so a long-time user has their rc file in whatever directory they unpacked it into, along with their packet directory, editor and colour choices. So an rc file sitting next to the program keeps that directory in charge, and %APPDATA% is only used when there is none. This is deliberately permanent rather than a compatibility shim: it is also how a portable copy on a removable drive should behave, and someone may well find a decade-old archive and try it. Documented in the manual for that reason. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Putting the settings under %APPDATA% would have quietly orphaned the configuration of anyone upgrading from an older Windows build. MultiMail shipped those as a plain archive -- upstream tested 32- and 64-bit console builds through Windows 10 -- so a long-time user has their rc file in whatever directory they unpacked it into, along with their packet directory, editor and colour choices.
So an rc file sitting next to the program keeps that directory in charge, and %APPDATA% is only used when there is none. This is deliberately permanent rather than a compatibility shim: it is also how a portable copy on a removable drive should behave, and someone may well find a decade-old archive and try it. Documented in the manual for that reason.