Nologic wrote:Has IDM ever looked at resolving this issue?
The answer on this questions is NO. The first question should be:
Has anybody ever requested an enhancement for using environment variables in working directory and bitmap/icon field?
The answer on this question is most likely also NO.
In my point of view the support for environment variables for working directory is not really needed. The working directory can be blank to use the working directory of UltraEdit if it is not important which directory is the working directory, or
%p or
%rp is used for the working directory. If it is for some reason absolutely necessary to set the working directory depending on an environment variable, it is quite easy to use a batch file with the commands
Command
dir must be replaced by real tool command.
%* passes simply all parameters to the tool passed from UltraEdit to the batch file.
Bitmap or ICO files for shared tools can be also stored in a directory which exists on all computers and does not depend on environment variables, paths of the operating system, language of the operating system or user account. That makes it also easier administrating the shared programs and files.
In my company I'm responsible for some tools including UltraEdit and yes, UE is installed with additional tools by default with their own ICO files. As we use in our company English and German Windows XP x86, English Windows 7 x86 and Windows 7 x64 (and former also Windows 98, NT4 and 2000), I started from beginning installing the shared tools and the additional files like the ICO files of the user tools into directory
C:\Programs. So it was no problem that the default program files directory is
C:\Program Files on English Windows XP and Windows 7 x86,
C:\Programme on German Windows XP,
C:\Program Files (x86) for 32-bit applications on Windows 7 x64 and
C:\Program Files for 64-bit applications on Windows 7 x64. And with installing the tools into subdirectories of
C:\Programs the problems caused by the standard security permissions of Windows are avoided too. Further with making shared files and tools independent of user account, multiple users on same computer can use these tools without the need to install the files and tools separately for every user.
Of course the user configuration files for the shared tools are stored in the application data directories of the tools to support multi-user environments, but not the program files of the shared tools and the additionally installed shared files which are installed always into a subdirectory of
C:\Programs.