VMD-L Mailing List

From: Pawel Kedzierski (pawel.kedzierski_at_pwr.edu.pl)
Date: Wed Mar 25 2015 - 03:50:29 CDT

Dear VMD developers and users,

I see on the vmd-l list and among my students that the default settings
of VMD on Windows OS are troublesome for many users. The problem is that
the working folder of VMD is its install folder (within "Program Files"
or "Program Files (x86)") which is guarded by the OS. If one tries to
save a file there, it is saved in hidden user folder and while it shows
up in Explorer, the VMD plugins are not able to find it.

Many times a "solution" found on the web and on vmd-l list is an advice
to run VMD as administrator, which is a bad idea.

I have tested that appending a single line to the end of vmd.rc in the
VMD installation prevents such problems, and it seems to me a general way:

cd %USERPROFILE%

However, for non-power users of Windows, editing the global vmd.rc file
is not trivial:
* the file is guarded by the OS too, due to location in system folder.
* as the file has Unix format, Notepad will concatenate all lines
effectively destroying it;

For users, the simplest solution may be to run Wordpad as administrator
to make this change, but still this tend to be confusing one must know
how to "show all files" at opening and then to save with original name
and text format, but neither with ".txt" appended, nor even worse,
converted to document format.

This is why I think that a better solution would be if the vmd.rc on
Windows would be installed with this fix included. And possibly also
converted to Windows text format.

Thanks,
Pawel