simeonrediger wrote:For the sake of others reading this, I tried this, and it didn't work for me; however, read below.
I'll take your advice and leave it in Documents. I've used Mac practically my whole life but recently bought a Windows PC for gaming, so I'm still learning about how this OS works. (In Mac OS, Documents is where one keeps personal documents; app-related documents are kept in the Library, which it seems I've erroneously analogized to Program Files).
I'm not saying Windows does this in the best possible way, but it sorta is what it is, and it does have a certain rough logic to it, mostly designed to keep you safe from rouge programs that would love to be able to mess with stuff in C:\Program Files at will, as well as being able to install a program once, but have entirely different program settings and data for different accounts on your computer.
So:
C:\Program Files : This is where the programs are installed. Windows will warn you with User Account Control when the program is first installed, but once you say "OK", the assumption is that NOTHING will or can write to this folder again without you actually manually doing it, and each time you do, you will again be warned. By default, programs may NOT write to their own program folder.
C:\Users\YourName\AppData & C:\ProgramData : This is where programs will keep and modify any "settings" for the program that it needs to manage. You generally won't manually change this stuff, which is why by default these folders are "hidden" from view. AppData is simply the "per user" form of this, and ProgramData is used for programs that are installed for "all users", and thus share settings.
C:\Users\YourName\Documents : This is where you store things that you create and save using your programs. In the past, "Documents" was pretty much exclusively used, but you will find that more and more things are being created one level up in C:\Users\YourName, such as "Pictures", "Music", "Videos" and the like. In any case, this is the location that is user-specific, and fully open for you to manually change as you see fit.
This is what I meant when I suggested that if you want to keep some "pure" meaning for Documents, you could set SkinPath to C:\Users\YourName\Rainmeter\Skins and put your skins there.
As to your description of how thing are on a Mac, there is some logic to that, as skins in Rainmeter are some weird hybrid between a "document" that you create in Rainmeter, and a "setting" that Rainmeter uses. The ancient .ini file format only clouds that a bit more, as .ini was originally designed to house "settings" for a program. While an argument could be made that skins would be a better fit in C:\Users\YourName\AppData\Roaming\Rainmeter\Skins, the problem is that there is just a TON of "manual" work that you need to do when working on skins, and by default Windows "hides" AppData. While you can unhide it, that issue will be a major point of confusion for our new users. Using Documents was the closest we could get to being easy and reasonably logical, and still working the way Windows really wants us to work.
Note: In future versions of Rainmeter, we may change the default for Skins\ out of Documents, and up one level to C:\Users\YourName\Rainmeter\Skins as described above. This isn't because we don't think Documents should be used this way, but rather because Windows has instituted a new "Protected Folders" security option, which won't allow programs to change things in the Documents folder except with an explicit "Save As" action by the user. There are several specific folders which will be protected this way, including "Documents", "Pictures", "Music", "OneDrive", and for some reason the Desktop. The intent is to try to defeat the "ransomware" malware that has been a problem recently. While this setting is "off" by default now, it might default to "on" at some point, or become more popular, and that is going to cause problems for Rainmeter. This is still under discussion, but we might move to head this problem off at some point.