rstudio-prefs.json in a custom location

[shaunson26]

I cannot seem to get RStudio to honour rstudio-prefs.json in a custom location (on Windows). If I set the XDG_CONFIG_HOME to a custom place, I find my dictionaries and keybindings will be saved there, but the rstudio-prefs.json is not honoured. Any ideas how to get this working?

We are moving to a citrix environment, where out AppData is wiped regularly. We lose all our settings. It's super painful.

Please halp!

[jonathan]

How exactly are you setting XDG_CONFIG_HOME? The preferences are read very early at startup (before R itself starts) so you need to set the environment variable prior to the launch of RStudio itself.

[shaunson26]

Hey Jonathan,

Thanks for replying.

I'm setting it with an .Renviron file. Does this explain the issue? Can you set it earlier?

Shaun

[jonathan]

Yes, that's the problem. .Renviron is read by R when it starts up, but at that point RStudio is already running.

You can either set XDG_CONFIG_HOME as a user or system environment variable:

Change environment variables as standard user

Or, if you only want it set for RStudio, make a shortcut that sets the variable and then starts RStudio:

Can I set an environment variable for an application using a shortcut in Windows?

[shaunson26]

Eggcellent.. Will try to action this later today. Hopefully can get admins to set this to be persistent in our annoying citrix environment. Thanks again for help!

[shaunson26]

Works as expected.. Thanks again!