mydocuments 0.1.6

Displays the path to the user's documents directory.

mydocuments

A command line tool that returns the path to the user's Documents directory.

Description

Conventional knowledge says that in Windows, user's default Documents directory is located in %USERPROFILE%\Documents.

This is wrong.

The Documents directory can exist in multiple locations:

    %USERPROFILE%\Documents
    %USERPROFILE%\OneDrive\Documents
    %USERPROFILE%\OneDrive - [Company Name]\Documents

In fact, a folder named Documents can exist in all of the above locations simultaneously.

They all may have files inside. Which one is the correct one?

That is for windows to know, and for you to find out.

Except, it's not that easy.

You see, there is no environmental variable that tells you which one is the correct one.

There is no environment variable that tells you whether OneDrive backup is enabled or not, or if it is, if it's personal OneDrive or OneDrive for Business.

This tool was written to eliminate the guess-work and provide a definite answer by making a Windows API call to retrieve the correct path.

For platform agnosticism sake, it also provides a fuzzy find method that attempts to guess a path to a folder named Documents by process of elimination.

That part of the program is somewhat error prone. The Windows API method on the other hand, will yield the correct result every time.

Usage

    mydocuments [-f | -w | -h | -v]

      --help,    -h    Show this help message and exit.
      --version, -v Show version information and exit.
      --fuzzy,   -f   Use a fuzzy multiplatform method.
      --winapi,  -w  Use Windows API method.

By default, if run on Windows the tool will use the accurate -w method. On other platforms it will default to the fuzzy finder, for obvious reasons.

Installation

Any Platform

You can install using uv (see uv):

uv tool install mydocuments

You can also run it without installing:

uv tool run mydocuments

Windows

On Windows, this tool is distributed via scoop (see scoop.sh).

First, you need to add my bucket:

scoop bucket add maciak https://github.com/maciakl/bucket
scoop update

Next simply run:

scoop install mydocuments

If you don't want to use scoop you can simply download the executable from the release page and extract it somewhere in your path.