Re: visiting "~/Application Data" gets "~" instead

[Eric Hanchrow]

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?