Arduino15 directory is an annoyance.

Development Tools IDE 1.x
1

Why can't everything be in one directory? I tried copying everything to my desktop/arduino area, but that created even more problems. How do you deal with this?

I bet a lot of you don't even know what I am talking about. Maybe it is Mac only.

2

(deleted)

3

It is due to the increased restrictions being put on application directories as operating systems improve security. Non-admin applications under recent versions of windows are not allowed to write to anything under program files (and there are some heinous hackjobs in the OS that try to maintain backwards compatibility; these are even harder to unpick if something goes wrong). This is consistent with windows being a multiuser operating system. If we both use the same computer, if everything was in the application folder, I could mess with the board packages you installed and vise versa. Program files and windows system directories have this sort of protection. So everything that the application can change after installation goes within your user folder.

The situation is similar to varying degrees on other operating systems.

It is annoying, but all security measures are.

4

Yeah, but computers are cheap, and even when they weren't, I don't recall much sharing going on.

5

And I am moving my stuff to iCloud and now I get compiler messages like four copies of esp8266-master found and the like. I WANT ONE COPY OF ALL THIS stuff.

6

use the 'portable' mode

7

is the idea of portable mode that you have all the files outside a protected directory? If so can't I just move all the files of arduino15 to my directory? (I have a Mac)

8

it could be a problem on Mac https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/PortableIDE#toc3

9

here a catch, there a catch, all 22

10

Well, that's a restriction inherent to MacOS as a security measure - they really lock down what applications you can run and how they can be handled and require signatures for everything - all so that they can continue to be the "more secure" consumer operating system. It does make life difficult for developer-types like us - but they don't really care about the small minority of users who do that sort of thing - their target is the luxury consumer market.

As I said above, these changes were forced on Arduino by the ever-increasing security measures of operating systems.