Neovim looks for and stores configurations in Windows locations instead of Unix locations

[500-internal-server-error]

Description / Steps to reproduce the issue

neovim has an official Windows version available, which uses Windows-style paths and locations to look for and store configuration files (e.g., %localappdata%\nvim-data\). As expected, on Linux, neovim uses Unix-style paths and locations instead (e.g., $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/nvim/).

In general, I expect MSYS2 / mingw to be a compatibility shim to allow traditionally native Unix utilities to run on Windows. This includes paths, but not locations. Doing so would cleanly separate documentation/tutorials/configurations for "native" Windows apps from *nix apps (which I consider MSYS2 / mingw apps to be, despite using native Windows APIs).

Tested with mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-neovim, but probably affects other environments too.

Expected behavior

I expect mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-neovim to use Unix locations to store and look for configuration files (e.g., $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/nvim).

Actual behavior

mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-neovim uses Windows locations to store and look for configuration files (e.g., %localappdata%\nvim-data).

Verification

• I have verified that my MSYS2 is up-to-date before submitting the report (see https://www.msys2.org/docs/updating/)

Windows Version

MSYS_NT-10.0-22621

MINGW environments affected

• MINGW64
• MINGW32
• UCRT64
• CLANG64
• CLANG32
• CLANGARM64

Are you willing to submit a PR?

No response

[oltolm]

There are different environments. What you are saying is only true for the MSYS environment. The UCRT64 environment you are talking about is for regular Windows applications. This is not a bug.

[lazka]

We should probably document somewhere what users have to expect in such cases.

[FrankHB]

This is not specific to neovim. Many others, like qbittorrent, will behave similarly. (I recall it because I've once forgotten to back the configuration in %LocalAppData% up before a system reinstallation...)

[Kreijstal]

you probably look for msys neovim, not mingw/ucrt these are meant to be used outside cygwin/msys, in cmd.exe, powershell.exe, not in the msys enviroment, for the msys enviroment, you have to use the vim version without any prefix, aka pacman -S vim not mingw-w64-$arch-vim, unfortunately, I do not think they accept packages that are dev based on msys itself so you have to compile neovim from scratch, (or use cygwin :( )

[lazka]

We should probably document somewhere what users have to expect in such cases.

This exists now: https://www.msys2.org/docs/configuration/

[prgreadonly]

You can workaround this by explictly specifying XDG_CONFIG_HOME:

XDG_CONFIG_HOME=~/.config nvim-qt

[FrankHB]

We should probably document somewhere what users have to expect in such cases.

This exists now: https://www.msys2.org/docs/configuration/

I've added some more text for users who want to hack against it. Please review.